


























































COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 










When the Days 
Seem Dark 


By 

Philip E^Howard 

: * 

Author of "Temptation" "The Many Sided David/ 
" Their Call to Service," and other works 



Philadelphia 

The Sunday School Times Company 






Copyright, 1920, by 
The Sunday School Times Company 


Printed in the United States of America 


OEC 30 1920 

©CI.A605163 


To 

my dear wife, 
whose abounding love 
and heart of joy 
have been sunshine 
all along the way. 

















































































• 




CONTENTS 


PAGE 

I. God's Care in Dark Days. 7 

II. The Power of a Quiet Mind . 13 

III. Panic . 21 

IV. Capitalizing Our Crises. 30 

V. When Changes Come. 36 

VI. Giving Thanks for What We Do Not 

Receive . 43 

VII. Suffering Perfectly . 50 

VIII. God's Deliverances . 57 

IX. Standing Still . 62 

X. When We Are Discouraged. 69 

XI. God Is Good. 75 

XII. His Patient Love . 81 

XIII. “And Breaking It He Gave to Them” 86 

XIV. The Reaction of the Critical Spirit.. 93 

XV. Two Lists . 100 

XVI. Attacking the Disagreeable Duty.... 106 

XVII. “They Toil Not, Neither Do They 

Spin” . 113 

XVIII. The Joys of the Christian Life...... 117 

XIX. “And Have It Abundantly” . 123 

XX. The Inescapable Spirit of God. 131 




















Most of these chapters 
have appeared as edi¬ 
torials in The Sunday 
School Times. A half 
dozen chapters are re¬ 
printed from The West¬ 
minster Teacher, and 
one from Forward, by 
courtesy of the publishers. 


CHAPTER I 

GOD’S CARE IN DARK DAYS 

She was a dear old lady from whom 
much that life holds had been taken away. 
She could only sit in her big chair and knit, 
and rheumatism had so crippled her that her 
arms were almost fixed in the position in 
which her visitor saw them, elbows close 
to her sides, and the hands close together 
on her breast, with fingers gnarled and bent. 
Yet she could knit. Her knees were drawn 
up almost to her hands, those crippled, busy 
hands of hers. 

Her face was radiant. She had passed 
such a good night. That was the outstand¬ 
ing reason. “Why,” she exclaimed joy¬ 
ously, “do you know, I slept for a half 
hour! And the sunrise! it was just won¬ 
derful. As I watched it I thought how 
good the Lord is to me, and what blessings 
I do have!” And the busy crippled hands 
went on knitting most cheerily. 

7 


8 


When the Days Seem Dark 


Well, it is something to be able to sleep 
a half hour. Not every one could see a sun¬ 
rise. And some folks are prevented from 
doing any work at all. Sleeping and 
waking and working—yes, God is good. 
That was the note of joy in the dear lady's 
happy talk. 

Yet some of us even now, in health and 
vigor, murmur about our hard lot, and go 
so far as to worry, and look askance at the 
least shadow that slips along toward us. 
We are neither sleepless nor crippled in 
the body, but we dwell so upon the shadows 
that overcast our days that we completely 
miss the great fact of God's unchanging 
outreach of care for us. Our infirmities, 
greater or less, make low-pressure areas 
all along the wide horizon of life, and our 
sunrises are mostly foggy. 

The trouble with some of us is this: we 
think a day is dark, because something we 
had has been taken away; because we can¬ 
not see the end of a cherished plan; be¬ 
cause we fearfully imagine that God is 
about to reverse his nature and his 
promises, and trample us under. We count 
that day when everything goes along as we 
have gladly expected a very cheerful sun- 


God’s Care in Dark Days 9 

shiny day; we are elated accordingly, and 
we devoutly thank God. 

But life is simply a dreadful mess unless 
we have a sounder philosophy than that. 
We really cannot rightly distinguish a dark 
day from a bright day by applying the im¬ 
pulsive tests we so often apply. Have we 
ever been consistently accurate for any 
length of time in specifying what was, and 
what was not, a dark day? Is it not liter¬ 
ally true that many a day which once 
seemed bewilderingly black has proved 
fairly golden? A boy of thirteen who lost 
an eye through an accident, and whose sight 
was in grave danger, came through that 
dark week with this conclusion. He wrote 
to a friend: “I have never felt the dear 
Lord so close to me before in all my life. 
Every one has been so kind to me, and I 
do not know what to make of it all. I am 
almost glad it happened, as it has been the 
biggest week in my life, but I know there 
are greater weeks yet to come. ,, Could not 
many of us who are older testify to like 
experiences, recurring with their impressive 
lessons, as though God were trying to ex¬ 
plain to us most patiently that we had bet¬ 
ter let him say what is the color of the day? 


10 When the Days Seem Dark 


Days that seem dark require indeed a 
profound philosophy of practical living in 
order to enable us to live through them joy¬ 
ously. Our dearest purposes are often 
thwarted; our losses seem too heavy to bear; 
our spirit almost fails under the stress with 
which life is set about. But over against 
the accumulated problem stands the firm 
fact of God's inevitable care. Whatever 
interests us interests him more. His care 
is not a varying quantity. He could care 
no more tenderly and faithfully for us on 
what we call bright days than on those we 
call dark. 

There is the heartening fact, when the 
shadows gather. His care is never fitful, as 
the sunlight is on the mountain side when 
the cloud shadows are fleeting across the 
scene, but his care is steadier than the sun 
behind the clouds. We might as well doubt 
his care on bright days, if we are going to 
do him that act of unfaith on dark days. 
His overseeing and providing love is abso¬ 
lute, not relative to our understanding of it. 
However we may regard it, that loving pro¬ 
vision of his is there anyway; and how 
dull and unresponsive we are when we do 
not expose ourselves to its full sunshine, 


11 


God’s Care in Dark Days 

and accept it as his gift, steadily pouring 
forth! 

These words are written in the night just 
before the dawn, in a home which has sud¬ 
denly become a hospital. Death has hovered 
very close to that home in the last few 
hours. The countryside is mantled in dark¬ 
ness. Loved ones are the battle ground of 
the terrific warfare of disease against 
health and life. The house is riding 
through the night, down the stellar lanes 
where the morning stars sang together in 
aeons gone, and they are singing now just 
before the dawn. As truly as the speeding 
earth courses in its ordered orbit, so this 
single, humble home moves along the vast 
sweep of God's plan. What if the night be 
heavy and menacing, and spectres of a 
wearied imagination move out of the dark, 
and swim into the bewildering maze of 
seemingly untoward events ? This home 
has its own sure place in God's plan. God 
is concerned in its welfare. He is not less 
certain in the dark than in the light. The 
night and the day, sunshine and shadow are 
blending ever in his age-long, unending 
unity of purpose for each one of his 
children, and his care simply cannot fail. 


12 When the Days Seem Dark 


May we not see all this in these lines by 
Robert Barbour? 

Lord, I thank thee who hast wounded for the mercy 
that abounded, 

For the multitudinous mercy flowing forward like 
a sea, 

For the deeps that, rolling o’er me, arched into an 
arm that bore me, 

For the thunder-step of time that woke thy peace, 
eternity. 

And I thank thee that the thunder never woke one 
word of wonder, 

Only hushed the murmurous thought and drove 
rebellion far away; 

That the wrath revealed outside me showed a rest 
where I might hide me, 

Till the inward clouds rejoined the outer darkness 
black as they. 

Therefore thee I praise for ever, merciful Taker, 
mighty Giver, 

Taking but to give, and giving none but thou to 
take away; 

And if darker clouds encrust thee, though thou slay 
me, I will trust thee, 

For thy hurt is simple healing, and thy darkness 
simple day. 


CHAPTER II 

THE POWER OF A QUIET MIND 

In the crowded aisles of the huge depart¬ 
ment store men and women were pressing 
eagerly about the counters. Christmas was 
almost at hand, and many gifts were to be 
bought for loved ones at home and far 
away. Many a face was brighter and 
cheerier than on other days in the year; yet 
many a face looked out through the crowd 
with frowns and anxious, troubled glances 
from eyes that snapped with impatience. 

It was a restless, moving crowd, now 
eddying turbulently where broad aisles 
crossed, now drifting in long lanes reaching 
as far as the eye could see, breaking into 
waves and rapids, flowing hither and thither 
without a moment’s rest. 

In sharp contrast to the scenes along the 
busy aisles was the scene within a small 
room high up in a comer of the building. 
There, with a single helper near him, sat a 
13 


14 When the Days Seem Dark 

man, who, to all appearances, might be 
quietly reflecting on a philosophical problem 
that had just occurred to him. He was 
talking with a visitor—talking as though in 
his home library on a winter’s night; talk¬ 
ing in a low voice whose cadences betrayed 
not the least commotion within. He was 
not wasting words. Every word counted. 
And there was no hurry, no jostling of un¬ 
ruly thoughts, but a steadiness that told of 
a curbed and disciplined mind. No man in 
all the city was more quiet in demeanor, 
more easily urbane, more orderly and 
patient in word and look than this man, 
whose toiling, driving, overcoming mind 
had invented the processes, planned the 
workings, and designed the attractiveness 
of a colossal mart where human needs are 
so met that the restless, happy, anxious 
crowd is drawn thither without quite know¬ 
ing why it is so. 

That steady, low-voiced, watchful man in 
the small room is a contradiction to the 
popular notion of high efficiency. The 
world looks for bustle and stir beneath the 
accomplished big result, and measures a 
man’s efficiency by the number of motions 
he makes, rather than by the number of use- 


The Power of a Quiet Mind 15 


ful motions he can lead others to make. But 
the mind that achieves is the quiet mind, 
the mind that is not flurried by events or its 
own activities. And the quiet mind is in 
itself an achievement which must precede 
such work as we may do at our best. 

Clear thought is not possible to the mind 
that is clouded by flurry. The business man 
who faces a great opportunity cannot lay 
hold of it with a masterful grip if he allows 
himself to become too excitedly interested 
in the gains which he thinks he sees just 
beyond the stroke. He must steady his 
thoughts by hard work on the problem be¬ 
fore him. The man who faces a crisis in his 
affairs can easily become helpless by dwell¬ 
ing nervously on the crisis, and fail to win 
through it, not from lack of average ability, 
but from sheer lack of steadiness and quiet 
thinking. The minister can take a sermon- 
germ, nourish it into life, and then kill it 
by mental uneasiness over what he vaguely 
fears may be its effect on his people. 

Nowhere is the power of a quiet mind 
more definitely felt than in the home circle. 
The father who rises in the morning, anx¬ 
ious and not rested, looking apprehensively 
to a day of events not to his liking, can 


16 When the Days Seem Dark 

throw the home life for that day into a fit 
of the blues which the brightest sunlight 
cannot drive away. Or, if he so chooses, he 
can quietly go about his day’s duties in so 
steady and hopeful a fashion that his dear 
ones will share throughout that day the 
spirit in which he began it. The mother 
with her crowding duties and numberless 
interruptions, her countless steps about the 
house, and with a mind full of the ever- 
recurring problems of child-training which 
she is not to discuss wisely before a 
mothers’ meeting, but must settle on the 
Spot,—that mother can by an unquiet mind 
make needless problems for herself, double 
her burdens, and ruin the joyousness of life 
which should be her children’s daily portion. 
Or, she can learn the art of quietness, keep 
the family in balance by her own poise, and 
move steadily on from one duty to another, 
refusing to be deprived of the power which 
comes with quietness of mind. 

What is true of the home where this 
power is found is true of every circle in 
life’s relationships. Good work and worry 
do not go together, clear thought and flurry 
cannot dwell together in the same mind at 
the same time. And in his plans and pur- 


The Power of a Quiet Mind 17 

poses for his children God has ever given 
prominence to the power which comes from 
a mind steadily holding to its appointed 
tasks, in restful, yet ever-achieving, trust in 
him. 

When David charged his son, Solomon, 
to build a house for Jehovah, the God of 
Israel, he said to him: “As for me, it was 
in my heart to build a house unto the name 
of Jehovah my God. But the word of 
Jehovah came to me, saying, Thou hast 
shed blood abundantly, and hast made great 
wars: thou shalt not build a house unto my 
name, because thou hast shed much blood* 
upon the earth in my sight. Behold, a son 
shall be born to thee, who shall be a man of 
rest; and I will give him rest from all his 
enemies round about: for his name shall be 
Solomon, and I will give peace and quiet¬ 
ness unto Israel in his days. He shall build 
a house for my name; and he shall be my 
son, and I will be his father.” And David 
himself, humbled in spirit, and seeing deeply 
into life’s secrets after many bitter ex¬ 
periences, cried out: “Jehovah, my heart is 
not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty; . . . 
Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; 
like a weaned child with his mother, like a 


2 


18 When the Days Seem Dark 


weaned child is my soul within me. O 
Israel, hope in Jehovah from this time forth 
and for evermore.” 

Thus the Preacher, when he had seen 
how man is envied of his neighbor for skil¬ 
ful work, which “is vanity and a striving 
after wind,” utters his conclusion: “Better 
is a handful, with quietness, than two hand¬ 
fuls, with labor and striving after wind.” 
Or, again, “Wisdom is better than strength, 
-. . . The words of the wise heard in 
quiet are better than the cry of him that 
ruleth among fools.” 

When Ahaz was in dire distress in the 
fear of Rezin and Pekah, Jehovah directed 
Isaiah to say unto Ahaz, “Take heed, and 
be quiet; fear not, neither let thy heart be 
faint, because of these two tails of smoking 
firebrands. . . .If ye will not believe, 
surely ye shall not be established.” And 
when the same prophet threatened the 
people for their trust in Egypt, he re¬ 
proached them with the charge: “In return¬ 
ing and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness 
and in confidence shall be your strength. 
And ye would not.” 

The New Testament has a like message 
again and again, and nowhere more impres- 


The Power of a Quiet Mind 19 


sively than in the story of the life of Jesus. 
He was busy, but never hurried; harassed, 
but never impatient; faced with social and 
religious problems of the most com¬ 
plex kind, yet never for a moment other 
than quietly clear in his answers. He 
pressed home his message with unparalleled 
vigor, disregarding the consequences to 
himselfj save as he needed to secure by 
reasonable care the opportunity to utter the 
truth whenever and wherever it would 
count for the most. The steadiness of 
Christ among adverse currents even among 
his friends; his majestic calm as a storm 
center of controversy or bitter hatred, 
were not to be his achievement alone; such 
power as this he taught his disciples to 
gain, and they did gain it, even as we can 
gain it, through him. Lacking the power of 
a quiet mind, which was also in Christ 
Jesus, we lack what we can have at the cost 
of letting go our nervous forebodings, our 
petty, fussy, hurrying anxieties which have 
no rightful place in the life of any child 
of God. With a mind at rest in God, and 
yet working tirelessly at the tasks he has set 
for us, we shall waste no time or tissue over 
the things that our un-Christian forebodings 


20 


When the Days Seem Dark 


create, but we shall work, perhaps for the 
first time in our lives, with the power of a 
quiet mind free to do its utmost. 

“Dear Lord and Father of mankind, 

Forgive our feverish ways ! 

Reclothe us in our rightful mind; 

In purer lives thy service find. 

In deeper reverence, praise. 

“Drop thy still dews of quietness, 

Till all our strivings cease; 

Take from our souls the strain and stress, 

And let our ordered lives confess 
The beauty of thy peace. 

“Breathe through the heats of our desire 
Thy coolness and thy balm; 

Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire: 

Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, 

O still small voice of calm!” 


CHAPTER III 
PANIC 

The crash had come. The long months 
and years of extension, the square-jawed 
rapacity of shrewd and powerful personali¬ 
ties, unchecked by any inner sense of right¬ 
ness, had come into its own,—an outburst 
of popular wrath, a sudden collapse of pub¬ 
lic confidence, and loss and bitterness on 
every hand. 

Wall Street was in turmoil. Reasoning 
or unreasoning, panic was king. The 
white-crowned caps of mounted reserves 
tossed in undulating lines above the crowd. 
The “Street” was in a frenzy. Long lines 
of anxious depositors wound in serpentine 
coils about the corridors of a great financial 
concern, and trailed far down through the 
restless, jostling crowd on the pavements. 
Automobiles honked their slow course down 
narrow lanes that opened to let them pass, 
and closed again. 

Here was palpitation in the very heart- 
21 


22 When the Days Seem Dark 


centers of the financial body of the western 
world. The crowds moved quickly, ner¬ 
vously. The whole atmosphere was charged 
with excitement. Would the banks hold 
out? Would that long line of depositors 
receive their own? What would the big 
men of the Street do to support the situa¬ 
tion? Where would it end? 

In contrast to all this there stood above 
the steps of the old Sub-Treasury building 
a strong and silent figure. Beside it and in 
every direction around it were the hurrying, 
jostling, worrying crowds, and just over 
against it that thin long line of anxious men 
and women. The figure was bareheaded; 
with strongly molded face slightly upturned. 
And over that eddying crowd a strong 
hand was outstretched as if the silent lips, 
so often heard in crisis times of American 
history, longed to speak a steadying word. 
The bronze Washington, with his out¬ 
stretched hand, was government, power, 
steadiness of poise, embodied in a figure 
ever colossal in actuality of achievement, 
and not the less so in its vivid contrast to 
the unquiet lesser men below it on that panic 
day. 

That scene was a typical life-scene of to- 


Panic 


23 


day and all days. Panic in the hearts of 
men whose dearest possessions seemed 
about to vanish, whose reward of toil, or 
plunder in piracy, was about to be stricken 
from the list of their assets; and close be¬ 
side them, reaching out almost appealingly 
over their excitement, a reminder of the 
reassuring fact that somewhere, in un¬ 
troubled quietness, there are abiding veri¬ 
ties, superior to the fatalities of men’s fol¬ 
lies or impotence, and only awaiting men’s 
call. 

It is not only in the financial world that 
panic seizes upon the hearts of men and 
women, chilling the blood with the thought 
of loss, and ruthlessly changed relation¬ 
ships, and perhaps lasting disgrace. There, 
indeed, with many the passion for money is 
strong, and any reversal in fortunes ap¬ 
proaches the supreme calamity in propor¬ 
tion to the strength of the money passion. 
But the element of panic in our lives is so 
likely to explode without any touch of the 
financial match, that those of us who have 
no money-worries are by no means exempt 
from its danger. In that hour when, from 
any cause, the heart sinks, the blood runs 
cold, when wild thoughts assail the mind, 


24 When the Days Seem Dark 


when the whole structure of life begins to 
buckle, panic is ready to take possession. 

Yet panic is in itself catastrophe, in itself 
to be dreaded and shunned and forestalled 
as the plague itself. Panic is ruin to the 
judgment, ruin to the will, ruin to the very 
faculties that can aid in overcoming the 
causes leading up to the wild fear that so 
maims us. And worst of all, panic is loss of 
confidence in God. In the thick of the jost¬ 
ling crowd we forget the outstretched hand. 

The mother, watching by the bedside of 
her little child whose hot hands and flushed 
cheeks tell of a dangerous fire within which 
may burn out that slender life, can unfit 
herself for the task by lacerating her mind 
with thoughts of the worst, with doubts of 
the doctor’s skill, with imaginations bred in 
those hours of physical depression* just be¬ 
fore the dawn. She can thus so forget the 
tender love of One who has watched with 
her all the night long, that she will not fully 
avail herself of his presence and proffered 
aid. She and the little child are in his 
keeping, and her tired spirit could find rest 
in his supporting love if she would not so 
■needlessly undertake to bear the strain of 
the dreaded loss before that loss has come. 


Panic 


25 


Childhood is not care-free. Its wild fears 
are grimly real, and get less recognition 
than those besetting us who are older. 
What have you done, teacher of boys or 
girls, to avert the wrecking strain of panic 
in the life of your pupils ? Do you remem¬ 
ber the dark hours of your school days 
when, just before examinations, you were 
afraid you might not “pass”? You had 
worked hard. You had received good 
marks. But to know the whole thing at 
once! To sit down with paper and pencil 
and answer any question on any part of the 
book, and be exalted or disgraced in accord¬ 
ance with that paper of yours—did any¬ 
thing throw you into a panic quite so surely 
as that! Your boys and girls to-day are 
not unlike you in those days. Have you 
steadied them at such times with an en¬ 
couraging word? Have you led them to 
higher levels of study-methods, to broader 
views of the functions of a teacher as some¬ 
thing other than an ogre who delights in 
trapping a student by the pitfall of a ques¬ 
tion-paper ? 

Is that growing boy in your home getting 
help and sympathetic encouragement from 
you against those hours in the dark when he 


26 When the Days Seem Dark 


stares into the corner shadows, hears in the 
rattle of a window the sure coming of a 
burglar, and agonizes silently in cold fear 
because he thinks you will laugh at him or 
scold him if he wakes you up? What if 
your Heavenly Father should treat with 
contempt your panic-times, when you, too, 
stare into the shadows closing in about you; 
when you, too, are somewhat ashamed of 
your fears, and yet cannot shake them off 
all alone in the dark? That boy is no less 
in distress than you are. Do you fairly 
represent the fatherhood of God in your 
exhibit of fatherhood toward him? When 
panic would be king, then is the Christian’s 
high opportunity of faith. 

Years ago, when delegates to the First 
World’s Sunday School Convention were on 
their way to London on the Bothnia, a fire 
broke out in the cotton in the hold. The 
passengers gathered on the upper deck well 
forward to watch the crew hoist the burn¬ 
ing bales from the heart of the ship and 
heave them overboard. One man whose 
wife had just retired for the night hastened 
to her stateroom and urged her to dress 
and go on deck. “Oh, I am sure everything 
will be all right,” she said quietly. “I think 


Panic 


27 


I’ll just go to sleep.” “Well,” he urged, 
“whether you feel afraid of the result or 
not, do come up and see the fire anyway!” 
She appeared on deck shortly, and joined 
the crowd who were watching the weird 
sight. When the fire had been entirely put 
out, the passengers gathered by the bridge 
and sang the doxology. • As the good 
woman made her way with her husband to 
their stateroom, she said earnestly, “We 
made one mistake up there.” “What’s 
that?” he inquired. “Oh,” answered his 
wife, “we ought to have sung the doxology 
while the fire was burning!” 

Those of us who will sing the doxology 
while the fire is burning will not be in a 
panic. And doxologies are far more sen¬ 
sible than panics at any time. For in what 
circumstances are we justified in losing our 
judgment, our courage, our confidence in 
God? 

The wiser heads in Wall Street on that 
panicky day knew that a restoration of pub¬ 
lic confidence was needed to check the un¬ 
rest. Men in whom the people had con¬ 
fidence must come forward and take the 
burden of the hour. There could be no 
panic when everybody had confidence in the 


28 When the Days Seem Dark 


management. Accordingly managements 
were revised, and confidence widely re¬ 
stored. Strong men declared and demon¬ 
strated that they were prepared to meet the 
emergency, and government gave assurance 
of the use of great reserves to stay the im¬ 
pending ruin of that hour. 

Does any one of us need a change of 
management? What elements, what ideals, 
what foundations have we to give us free¬ 
dom from the ravages of panic in ourselves? 
What reserves have we to buttress the tot¬ 
tering walls of our defense against the 
collapse of character. Midianites and 
Amalekites go down in panic. Jehovah 
does not purpose that for his people. The 
disciples on that stormy sea of Galilee were 
terrorized by what they saw coming to them 
through the dark. But the Master’s prompt 
identification of himself shifted the empha¬ 
sis of the scene completely. It is ever his 
way. “It is I, be not afraid.” He takes 
charge, assumes the burden, utters reassur¬ 
ing words, and turns distraction and panic 
into quiet, trustful thought about himself. 
That disciple who seemed to have peculiar 
capacity for receiving the outpoured love 
of Jesus writes to others, in order that their 


Panic 


29 


joy may be full, this high and simple mes¬ 
sage of security, “Love not the world, 
neither the things that are in the world. . . . 
And the world passeth away, and the lust 
thereof, but he that doeth the will of God 
abideth forever. ,, 

Is there any room for panic here? It is 
a sure and lasting repose in struggle, a per¬ 
ennial pledge of strength by the way, of 
steadiness of soul in every crisis, and of a 
security that nothing need disturb unless 
we choose the transitory and futile rather 
than the abiding verities. 


CHAPTER IV 

CAPITALIZING OUR CRISES 

Crises are seldom what we would choose, 
if we could have our way. Crises are some¬ 
times conjunctions of events that we go to 
great lengths of manipulation to prevent, 
for if we can only head off certain untoward 
happenings in time, then perhaps they never 
will meet at the dreaded point. 

It is well worth while to take a good deal 
of trouble to divert some of the joinings of 
events in which we foresee calamity. We 
can sometimes by wise counsel head off a 
letter that would have broken up friendly 
relationships if it had gone its way. We 
can get the attention of a committee fixed 
upon the heart of a matter so interestedly 
that a discussion about non-essentials, which 
had latent explosive power, drops out of 
sight in the light of a truer vision. And 
sometimes when affairs are rushing head¬ 
long into a state of things utterly contrary 
30 


Capitalizing Our Crises 31 

to right and fairness, we may well take 
time and trouble to get them on the right 
road again. Some potential crises ought 
clearly never to occur. 

But many of us are not discriminating 
about this. We select the wrong things to 
head off. Perhaps we see personal discom¬ 
fort ahead, or perhaps we have a lack of 
conclusiveness in our natures that holds us 
back from even letting anything decisive 
come to pass if we can help it. Sometimes 
we really are not clear about what we ought 
to do, and the occasion just slips by us in 
the fog, and is gone. But is it not usually 
true that when we would give almost any¬ 
thing to avoid a crisis, it is because we feel 
like the driver of a runaway team, who 
thinks that if he can only keep it going 
without hitting anything, he will come 
through safely when the horses get tired? 

The trouble is that some of the most for¬ 
bidding crises are exactly what we would 
most welcome if we only knew their iden¬ 
tity, even as a small boy, lost and bewildered 
in the dark woods, would rush into the arms 
of that terrifying figure yonder in the dusk, 
if he but realized that the figure is his own 
father out looking for him. Wouldn’t it be 


32 When the Days Seem Dark 


wise for us to be more hospitable than we 
are to crises? 

The discipline is good. Try as we may 
to avoid issues, to ameliorate the shock of 
decisiveness, the hour comes when we must 
act, whether we like to or not. Abraham 
may remain a pastoral chieftain, or he may 
father a chosen people. God brings him to 
a flat decision. Moses cannot hold to Egypt 
while he makes a trial trip with the Hebrews 
into the desert to see how he is going to 
like it. Saul of Tarsus cannot take a day 
or two for considering what middle ground 
he can find between a more liberal attitude 
toward the followers of the Nazarene, and 
a sharp break with his previous conscien¬ 
tious convictions. The vision on the 
Damascus road was something more than a 
tentative suggestion looking toward a pos¬ 
sible alteration of attitude. It was a blind¬ 
ing crisis, out of which Paul got the whole 
glorious meaning without dodging the 
issue. But some men might have tried to 
shuffle and argue, and defer after the 
fashion of Donald Hankey’s eminent theo¬ 
logian in “A Student In Arms,” who thus 
summed up a debate: “Well, gentlemen, 
speaking for myself, I think I may venture 


Capitalizing Our Crises 33 

to say that I should feel inclined to favor 
a tendency in a positive direction, with res¬ 
ervations.” 

Dodging a crisis that God provides is the 
worst, the stupidest way in which we can 
treat it. For divine discipline requires that 
no crisis shall scare us or shock us out of 
obedience to God. So instead of dodging 
our crises, or groaning about them, why 
not capitalize them by an investment of the 
most joyous faith, and an expectant wel-^ 
come? If an end to something must come, 
it is but the beginning of something new 
from God’s hand. If things ought not to 
go on as they are, why doubt that God is 
ready to reveal and to put through a better 
arrangement ? A crisis yields value in direct 
ratio to our investment in it. And it leaves 
us a bit the worse off when we let timidity 
prevent us from the good investment of 
obedient faith. 

But there are crises so crowded with im¬ 
port beyond any rearrangement of outward 
circumstances that the whole spiritual status 
may have to be changed because of them. 
One of our difficulties is our fondness for 
status. We are not mobile enough, when it 
comes to any stir in the processes by which 


3 


34 When the Days Seem Dark 


God forwards our life. Perhaps we have 
been holding fast to a rock-ribbed convic¬ 
tion that is anything but scriptural. In a 
quiet time with an overlooked part of God's 
Word the Spirit sends a new light shining 
up through a passage we had not known 
was there, and suddenly we know that the 
wrong conviction must yield to the Scrip¬ 
ture truth. As in a flash we see a little of 
what it will mean to be separated from that 
favorite notion, and to follow the plain 
truth. How the weakness of the flesh re¬ 
volts from the crisis! 

Such crises are spiritually very fruitful 
if we do not spoil them by smoothing them 
away. It is the thing just beyond the de¬ 
cision that gives us concern, but to refuse 
the challenge of truth at such an hour is 
disastrous beyond our most imaginative 
fears. As Christian men and women shall 
we not joyously claim for ourselves Paul’s 
experience, as given in Weymouth’s trans¬ 
lation of Philippians 1:12, “Now I would 
have you know, brethren, that what I have 
gone through has turned out to the further¬ 
ance of the Good News, rather than other¬ 
wise.” 

And what more than that could we ask 


Capitalizing Our Crises 


35 


as the yield from the investment of faith 
that we make in our crises ?, 


CHAPTER V 
WHEN CHANGES COME 

If one were to judge by the traffic, the 
love of change is an overpowering passion 
of the soul. Endlessly the shuttle of traffic 
weaves its web of change over the face of 
the earth, over the lives of men. All of us 
feel the stir of it, the desire for a different 
outlook, for glimpses of other folk and 
scenes. Hence the restless movement on 
land and sea, the currents of enterprise and 
adventure and exploration. 

But the love of change does not bear 
upon life quite so hard as the fear of it. 
We welcome the changes that we devise for 
ourselves; we look with concern at the hori¬ 
zon from which we conjecture the possible 
coming of changes not of our choosing. 
We are great believers in things as they 
are; we are devotees of the arrangements 
with which we are familiar,—unless, in- 
36 


When Changes Come 


37 


deed, we ourselves decide that they ought 
to be different. 

We do not always discriminate wisely in 
proposing changes, for some of the things 
we restlessly seek are very unsatisfying 
when we get them, while others that would 
be infinitely a gain to us are kept at a dis¬ 
tance by our fear or our indifference. How¬ 
ever, so long as we think we are managing 
the affair, and are proceeding with gathered 
experiences that we approve, we are likely 
to be happy about it. 

It is the thing over which we have no real 
control that stirs our misgivings. The loss 
of work through some economic upheaval; 
the death of loved ones; the breaking down 
of health; the inroads of age,—what fore¬ 
bodings darken the moments when our 
thoughts hover about such prospects ! 

It is strikingly true that the issues well 
recognized by most of us to be wrapped up 
in the hidden plans of God are those that 
we most acutely dread, not the things in 
which we perceive a place for our con¬ 
trolling hand. For we often cry out in 
crises, “Oh, it would be so different if I 
could only do something about it; but I can 
only wait!” The changes most feared, then, 


38 When the Days Seem Dark 


are those that come straight from the One 
who loves us most, not reshaped by any 
human touch! 

We should not have the fear of change 
that we do have, if we had more fear of 
distrusting God. In his unfolding plan for 
our lives there will always be changes quite 
beyond our foresight or planning. You note 
year after year a great pine-tree where two 
mountain streams meet in a wonderful for¬ 
est. One day you pass that way and the 
tree is a wreck, splintered unbelievably by 
the lightning stroke. You thought of that 
tree as a permanent part of the landscape, 
and you expected to see it each year when 
you took your mountain outing. But it is 
gone now. The change has come, the type 
of change that we know does come. Why 
not quietly realize the fact of change, and 
find a way to survive the disappearance of 
the old, loved landmarks and friends, with 
a trustful spirit? We are likely to think 
that things will go on as they are, until we 
come upon the stricken pine, or the empty 
chair, or the news of an old friend’s Home¬ 
going. We know better. Such changes are 
the normal experience of mankind. 

But when changes come we ought not to 


When Changes Come 


39 


find ourselves hardened to them. We need 
not let the certainty of altered circum¬ 
stances, the sure coming of life into empty 
places, make any lines of grimness in the 
face that we turn toward the facts. Some 
of the most precious disciplines of life come 
to us after we have decided not to' lock up 
our griefs behind the iron doors of silent, 
secret agony, but to let the whole meaning 
of the change through which we have 
passed take its full share in mellowing our 
sympathies, and in making us channels of 
an understanding helpfulness to others. 

A country woman, whose life was smitten 
with a keep disappointment in its earlier 
years, was so distracted by her grief that 
reason failed again and again. But God 
had not let go of her life, and as the years 
passed she emerged into the large and sunlit 
atmosphere of joy in Christ. Very poor in 
this world's goods, she became rich in other 
ways, and her home became a Bethel for 
the unfortunate and sinning. It was her 
purpose, she said, that no one who visited it 
should leave without a blessing. She stood 
one day in the open doorway of another 
home, about to take her leave after a brief 
call upon that household. They had knelt 


40 When the Days Seem Dark 


in prayer with her, at her own request, and 
she had asked God to bless all within that 
home. She turned back as she was about 
to leave, and with a quiet smile upon her 
face she said: “You know we cannot 
always tell just how God will send the bless¬ 
ing we ask for. He will surely send it,”— 
and then with a look of remembrance and 
of joy, “but it may be the pruning hook, you 
know.” By way of the pruning hook her 
own life was bearing fruit even in that 
moment. And fruit-bearing does not arise 
from grim resignation. 

Just now the world is a welter of bewild¬ 
ering changes, running like streams of vol¬ 
canic fire along new channels, excoriating 
life with a fury that staggers the mind. Not 
only the glare of national upheavals is in 
our eyes but the fire burns its way into the 
heart of our tenderest personal relation¬ 
ships. How are men and women to meet 
the violent, cataclysmic changes that are 
coming into individual lives the world over? 
In the thick of it all, one age-long fact 
looms with a pure and reassuring glory be¬ 
fore our smitten eyes. 

There walks with us One who does not 
change, in a life-giving relationship that 


When Changes Come 41 

does not change, nor has changed from the 
beginning. 

He was before the dawn of things. He 
walks unweariedly with man through man's 
long day. He waits in the red sunset of the 
age to prepare a new day glorious even be¬ 
yond prophetic power to disclose in its ful¬ 
ness. Those who walk with Him are in the 
world, but not of it, moving with under¬ 
standing mind and strong heart and joyous 
faith straight through the storms of change, 
gathering up into a peace that passeth 
understanding the very elements of life that 
apart from Him are impossible to resolve 
into the material of hope and joy. That of 
which I may be deprived was never perma¬ 
nent; that which cannot be taken away I 
am not to lose. All the deepest elements 
of the sweet and holy relationships of life 
no violence of change can take from me, for 
the Christ with whom I walk gave them to 
me, and wove them into the wonder that 
we call life. So while my heart may ache 
with longing for those who have been called 
Home, while I may be stripped of goods 
and position and dear associations, I may 
take the road day by day with my Friend, 
and in that unending fellowship talk with 


42 When the Days Seem Dark 


Him about the memories I cherish, while 
looking with all joy and trustfulness for the 
next disclosure of his plan. 

Indeed, when changes come, Christ not 
only does not go, but—if that were possible 
—draws even closer than before. Are we 
really afraid that, having put our trust in 
Him, we shall find Him unequal to our need 
of guidance and comfort? Shall we not 
rather, from full hearts and an abounding 
faith, sing with an ever-deepening joy as 
we journey, 

“In heavenly love abiding, 

No change my heart shall fear. 

And safe in such confiding, 

For nothing changes here. 

The storm may roar without me, 

My heart may low be laid; 

But God is round about me, 

And can I be dismayed? 

“Wherever He may guide me, 

No want shall turn me back; 

My shepherd is beside me, 

And nothing can I lack. 

His wisdom ever waketh, 

His sight is never dim; 

He knows the way He taketh, 

And I will walk with Him.” 


CHAPTER VI 

GIVING THANKS FOR WHAT WE 
DO NOT RECEIVE 

When our hearts are lifted in thanksgiv¬ 
ing to God for unbounded mercies, the 
broader and deeper view of thanksgiving 
is often obscured by the thought that God’s 
bounty toward us consists wholly of what 
we receive. The overflowing horn of plenty 
is a common sign of the thanksgiving spirit, 
—the full harvest gathered in readiness for 
crowded barns, and the laden table, com¬ 
monly express the readily understood 
causes for gratitude. But we have as good 
reason to be thankful for what God has not 
permitted us to receive as we have for the 
recognized gifts that he has poured into our 
lives. 

We are such hungry and ill-advised 
children in our eagerness for the things of 
this life that we need quite as much the 
43 


44 When the Days Seem Dark 


restraint of a wise Father, lovingly refusing 
our thoughtless desires, as we do the lavish 
hand of ready giving extended to us by the 
same loving Father. Every one of us can 
look back to a day when we were almost 
ready to demand of God that he should do 
for us that which our whole soul longed for 
with passionate desire. Nothing else would 
do; no other matter in our lives seemed so 
important just then as this one thing that 
we were asking of him. Yet in later days 
we have come to learn with profound grati¬ 
tude God’s infinite, loving wisdom in with¬ 
holding from us the one thing that we were 
then convinced was needful. We cannot 
know all the circumstances that God knows; 
we cannot understand the subtle forces that 
are at work to make us wish for the worst, 
and pray for damage when we are acting 
on the supposition that we are seeking what 
is best. But we can know, with a profound 
conviction that enables us to put that knowl¬ 
edge into practise, that God is just as wise 
and tender and bounteous in his withhold¬ 
ings as he is in his givings. Indeed, some 
of us have known how blessed it is to real¬ 
ize that God himself, when he is holding 
back something for which we have asked, is, 


Giving Thanks 


45 


by that very act, pouring out upon us the 
highest blessing which at that moment his 
infinite wisdom can prepare. 

It is a common experience, too, that we 
may be unspeakably grateful for the ever- 
amazing fact that we have not received 
what we deserve. Each one knows well 
enough what he means by this. It is not 
possible for the human mind to picture with 
perfect vividness the utter and overwhelm¬ 
ing contrast that there is between the sin- 
stained soul and the stainless Lord of Glory. 
It is well for us that we do not have to set 
up such a contrast as this in words, and that 
God does not purpose that we shall be living 
in the dread shadow of such a picture as 
that. We who have deserved death are by 
his mercy not called upon to accept our 
deserts, but on the contrary we are offered 
abounding life. Such a love as this on the 
part of One to whom any sin must be utterly 
abhorrent is beyond our human measures; 
but our hearts leap with a glad thanksgiving 
joy because we have a Father whose love 
has gone to such lengths as this. In the 
light of such a love it is only the most 
recreant spirit, perverse and headstrong in 
its haste away from God, that can for an 


46 When the Days Seem Dark 


instant wish to presume upon this tender¬ 
ness and mercy. 

Our gratitude to God is quickened by the 
memory of the disasters that we were quite 
sure were headed in our direction, and yet 
which were by his loving hand diverted in 
ways that we could not have compassed at 
all. Underneath all the manifold examples 
of this in the more easily discerned things 
of life, are the averted spiritual troubles 
that were at one time heading toward us 
with what seemed to be an unavoidable 
calamity. We did not want to be as we 
feared we were going to be. Habits of long 
standing, tendencies that had not had any 
early control, likes and dislikes that were 
warping us out of normal health of body 
and mind and spirit, were nevertheless doing 
their work so thoroughly that the end 
seemed only too near, and too dark for us 
to face at all. Yet in that very hour, when 
in our helplessness we have turned to God 
and have committed ourselves to him, the 
most marvelous peace has come, and the 
clouds on the horizon have been driven 
away by the strong winds of heaven, the 
light of a new day has broken in upon us, 
and that which seemed about to crush us 


47 


Giving Thanks 

has been met by the “strong Son of God” 
and abolished. Who is there, in mature life, 
who cannot recall with a still amazed and 
still mystified thankfulness such divertings 
and such abolishings of calamity? There is 
hardly anything else in experience which so 
heightens our conception of the mercy of 
God, and which so quickens the heart into 
thankfulness, as this interference of God 
with the destiny that we were blindly de¬ 
vising for ourselves. 

We may well be grateful that God has 
withheld from us some of the faculties that 
we have thought so needful to the working 
out of his plans in our lives. Some men are 
never fruitful in any wide usefulness to 
mankind until they are reduced to the con¬ 
centrated use of some one faculty. Hero¬ 
ism of the purest sort shines forth in lives 
that have been deprived of cherished abili¬ 
ties, and the whole nature has seemed to go 
out with a new power into the lives of other 
men through a hitherto unsuspected ability. 
Take away one man’s powers of locomotion, 
and in his helplessness and enforced quiet 
he becomes a more distinguished winner of 
souls than ever, through conversations and 
through personal letters, and leads thousands 


48 When the Days Seem Dark 


of others out into the same work by his 
writings. Draw the veil over another man’s 
eyes, and his soul pours itself out in music 
or in poetry or in a high order of executive 
work. Let a woman be recalled from a 
place of high social distinction and many 
neighborhood duties to the care of some one 
who is utterly dependent upon her, or let 
her be removed from public life by circum¬ 
stances that she can neither explain nor 
avoid, and a new center of radiance has 
been established, which might have been 
lost to the world. Who knows what can be 
done through any one of us until God has 
pointed out, perhaps by elimination, the one 
great thing for that life to do? 

Stephen Phillips in his poem, “To Milton. 
—Blind,” thus sets forth this truth: 

“He who said suddenly, ‘Let there be light 1’ 

To thee the dark deliberately gave; 

That those full eyes might undistracted be 
By this beguiling show of sky and field, 

This brilliance, that so lures us from the Truth. 

He gave thee back original night, His own 
Tremendous canvas, large and blank and free, 
Where at each thought a star flashed out and sang. 
O blinded with a special lightning, thou 
Hadst once again the virgin Dark! and when 
The pleasant flowery sight, which had deterred 
Thine eyes from seeing, when this recent world 
Was quite withdrawn; then burst upon thy view 
The elder glory.” 


Giving Thanks 


49 


Thanksgiving must mean much more to 
us than the counting up of material gains. 
Great as such blessings are in many lives, 
thankfulness is no mere sense of satisfac¬ 
tion because of additions to the gains that 
can be measured by rule and weight. There 
are empty places in our lives for which we 
may well be unspeakably grateful. 


4 


CHAPTER VII 
SUFFERING PERFECTLY 

To suffer is a privilege. To escape from 
this privilege is the purpose of weaker souls 
who do not know what suffering means. 
To suffer is to bear up, to carry the burden 
given to us to carry, without shirking. Its 
essence is not in pain as an affliction, but in 
the bearing of pain as a challenge to courage 
and endurance. 

Suffering in the truest sense cannot fairly 
be pictured by a crushed and baffled wreck 
of a man, but rather by the vision of a form 
erect and competent, sturdily set up for the 
lifting of loads and the carrying of cares, 
pushing on enduringly. To suffer is to bear 
up into the teeth of things, painfully if need 
be, but with no unstringing of fiber, no 
liquefying of the bones, no lapse into a mere 
quiver of aches and pains. 

In its true meaning, suffering is not what 
we feel in the sensitive nerves of body 
50 


Suffering Perfectly 


51 


or spirit, so much as the up-bearing by 
which we meet the painful and the burden¬ 
some. The word is made up of two Latin 
words, sub, —under, and fero, —carry, or 
bear, which when taken together have the 
significance of bearing up from under, as 
when one carries a burden. It is therefore 
a word the emphasis of which is altogether 
on the way by which we meet, or carry, the 
burden, rather than on the pain or stress 
caused by the burden. 

And when we place the emphasis where it 
belongs, when we count it a joy to be push¬ 
ing on with our shoulders under the load, 
when we must throw all our powers into 
severest action until the doing hurts,—then 
we begin to catch the meaning of suffering 
as a privilege in the school of character. 

For this root-meaning of suffering by no 
means takes away its hardness. To bear up 
is a severe gymnastic for body and soul. To 
“suffer” as nobly and as thoroughly as we 
know how is an achievement of no mean 
proportions. It is less taxing to the fiber of 
character to drop back into the common¬ 
place suffering which reposes on the sym¬ 
pathy of friends, and awakens a brooding 
self-pity. To bear up, and to do it hourly, 


52 When the Days Seem Dark 


daily, endlessly; to bear up under a weight 
of sorrow, and chagrin, and sense of fail¬ 
ure; to do the thing we must do, whether 
we feel like it or not,—all this has its part 
in the up-bearing of body and spirit that 
suffering implies. The hardness does not 
disappear, but works out its mission in a 
character better fitted to endure hardness 
to the very end. 

Every true life is the story of achieve¬ 
ment in suffering, in bearing up. It is the 
glory of every such life that it meets its 
obligations sturdily, bears its burdens with 
steady gains in poise and deep serenity of 
soul, and makes no compromise with the 
thing that is hard to do or to bear. Even 
the sense of failure, reaching for the very 
heart with its choking death-grip on the 
springs of life, does not master the man 
who will suffer courageously, who will bear 
up under the consciousness of his own 
shortcomings, in the quiet trust of a child of 
God who dares to be disciplined by up¬ 
bearing. To suffer under a sense of failure 
is not to become swamped in failure, but to 
push on and up and out of the weight of 
past failures by the grace of Christ into 
buoyancy and progress straight through 


Suffering Perfectly 


53 


the bufferings we are sure to encounter. 

When disappointment comes, when the 
cherished hope fades, it is then, too, that 
we need to read suffering aright. Not the 
pain of it, but the up-bearing under it, 
ought to be in our thought. The sermon 
we meant to preach, when we had the clear 
vision alone with God, was not the one that 
the people heard from the pulpit; the busi¬ 
ness plan that looked so well on paper did 
not result in practise as it did in prospect; 
the dinner so carefully arranged for the 
guest of honor did not come through wholly ‘ 
unscathed; the dream of a college course 
was changed by new obligations to the 
drudgery of the store. In all these issues 
of life, none of them trivial to the respon¬ 
sible actor in them, the bearing-up under 
disappointment is a duty and a discipline. 
Some are embittered by such dashing of 
their hopes, and some grow surly and ill- 
natured and cynical. But those who under¬ 
stand the uplift of suffering come tri¬ 
umphantly out of such experiences by up¬ 
bearing in them. 

Those who do not know suffering in its 
real essence can do but little to help others. 
So many of us who know what pain is 


54 When the Days Seem Dark 


might be immensely more useful to others 
who know pain, if we could grasp the mean¬ 
ing of suffering, and accept its disciplinary 
work in us. It is not enough, in helping 
others, to have had pain, and illness, and 
sorrow, and to say so in an attempt at sym¬ 
pathy. For sympathy is “suffering with,” 
—bearing up with others, as we would if 
we should put our shoulder under a load 
too heavy for a fellow-traveler on the road, 
and bear up with him. And unless we do 
better than recount our pains and our sor¬ 
rows in our effort to help others, we simply 
add to the story of the world’s grief, which 
has no real cheer in it for any sufferer. But 
if we can enter understanding^ into an¬ 
other’s distress, and help him to bear it by 
emphasizing the blessings of up-bearing as 
we have known them, and as we can help 
our friend to know them, we have sympa¬ 
thized, suffered with, up-borne with him in 
his hour of trial. 

The pathos of the failing companionship 
in Gethsemane was in the word “with.” 
“Could ye not watch with me one hour?” 
Could ye not enter into my need, be with 
me in it, share it with me for just a little 
while, and with me bear up the burden? 


Suffering Perfectly 55 

The utter loneliness of Jesus among his 
chosen friends is painfully clear in that 
hour of his need. And it may be that lone¬ 
liness has gripped the soul of one who is 
counting upon you, because you never do 
enter fully into the up-bearing of his bur¬ 
dens with him, suffering with him for even 
a little while. 

In the upbearing under burdens we are 
limited to this life. If we are to suffer with 
others for their uplifting, or alone, as a 
child of God in his sure keeping, it must 
be accomplished here. It is this thought 
that Ugo Bassi set forth in his “Sermon in 
the Hospital,” and the truth of it is a back¬ 
ground against which the glory of suffer¬ 
ing shines forth upon all life. 

“One thought has often stayed by me 
In the night-watches, which has brought at least 
The patience for the hour, and made the pain 
No more a burden which I groaned to leave, 

But something precious which I feared to lose. 
********* 

But if, impatient, thou let slip thy cross, 

Thou wilt not find it in this world again, 

Nor in another; here, and here alone. 

Is given thee to suffer for God’s sake. 

In other worlds we shall more perfectly 

Serve him and love him, praise him, work for him, 

Grow near and nearer him with all delight; 

But then we shall not any more be called 
To suffer, which is our appointment here. 


56 When the Days Seem Dark 


Canst thou not suffer then one hour,—or two? 

If he should call thee from thy cross to-day, 

Saying, It is finished!—that hard cross of thine 
From which thou prayest for deliverance, 

Thinkest thou not some passion of regret 
Would overcome thee? Thou wouldst say, ‘So 
soon? 

Let me go back and suffer yet a while 
More patiently;—I have not yet praised God.* 

And he might answer to thee,—‘Never more, 

All pain is done with.* Whenso’er it comes, 

That summons that we look for, it will seem 
Soon, yea too soon. Let us take heed in time 
That God may now be glorified in us; 

And while we suffer, let us set our souls 
To suffer perfectly ; since this alone, 

The suffering, which is this world’s special grace, 
May here be perfected and left behind.’* 


CHAPTER VIII 
GOD’S DELIVERANCES 

They are not quite like ours. When we 
have kept a man in prison for a few years, 
we may, under certain conditions, parole 
him. He goes out to work as far as his 
tether will let him, but the old charge still 
has a light line tied to him, and any tug on 
it reminds him that his freedom is not all 
that it might be. 

When he has served his time he goes out 
nominally a free man, but really not free. 
For the dark past reaches out a detaining 
hand if he would wholly forget it, and some 
doors that swing wide for the entrance of 
other men too often open only about enough 
for him to get his foot in for a moment, and 
then shut again, with the man on the outside 
where he was. 

We say we have set poor John Doe free. 
But John Doe knows better. Freedom isn’t 
all that it is cracked up to be when the past 
57 


58 When the Days Seem Dark 


can be so binding as to make a man careful 
about revealing it, lest the penalty he once 
paid must be paid over again in costly ways 
among his neighbors. 

God's deliverances are not of the tether 
or detaining sort. When he delivers a man 
from bondage, the freedom that man en¬ 
joys is so complete that the only way in 
which the psalmist can express it is by the 
illimitable distance between east and west 
to mark the remoteness of the new liberty 
from the old chains, and there is even a 
promise on record in which the separation 
from the past sin is expressed by such a 
miracle as the actual forgetting of the sin 
by the mind of God. That ought to be de¬ 
liverance enough for any one. It is God's 
way, not man's. 

God's deliverances, too, are not merely 
arranged to break our bonds, but to keep 
us from getting into the shackles in the first 
place. Who does not look back to a critical 
hour—yes, many such hours—when he 
would have done an evil thing if God had 
only let him alone at the moment. But just 
then God spoke to him in a still small voice, 
in the song of a bird, the call of the stream, 
the cheery voice of a friend, in the austere 


God’s Deliverances 


59 


demand of a pressing duty, in the laughter 
of a child—and the spirit revolted against 
the evil purpose, and the man went free. 

“A door clanks loose, the gust beats by. 

The chairs stand plain about; 

Upon the curving mantel high 
The carved heads stand out. 

The maids go down to brew and bake, 

And on the dark stairs make 

A clatter, sudden, shrill— 

Lord, here am I 

Clear of fhe night and ready for thy will.” 

There is no part of God’s dealings with 
us as Christians that holds us greater debt¬ 
ors to him than his interruptions of our 
wrong purposes, and his warnings to stand 
clear of whatever would entangle us. “In 
old days,” writes George Eliot in “Silas 
Marner,” “there were angels who came and 
took men by the hand, and led them away 
from the city of destruction. We see no 
white-winged angels now, but yet men are 
led away from threatening destruction; a 
hand is put into theirs, which leads them 
forth gently towards a calm and bright 
land, so that they look no more backward; 
and the hand may be a little child’s.” 

Perhaps our consciousness of God’s de¬ 
liverances is never quite so great as when 


60 When the Days Seem Dark 


we are freed from what we call “a tight 
place.” Circumstances have pressed in 
upon us until we realize our utter helpless¬ 
ness in the face of the besetting events. Our 
sense of freedom is gone, and it is a com¬ 
mon thing to say that our hands are tied. 
Impotence is so manifest that we are then 
in danger of profound discouragement, and 
we have a stifled and hunted desperateness 
holding us in its grip. 

Suddenly, by some unforeseen and, so 
far as we are concerned, unmanaged group¬ 
ing of events, we come out into the clear 
spaces and broad relief of freedom. It is 
easy then to thank God and to praise him 
for the deliverance and release that we can 
explain only by reference to his providence, 
and not by anything that we have done at 
all. 

Some of us pass through experiences of 
this type again and again and never quite 
learn the lesson that we were delivered just 
as much while circumstances were simply 
smothering us as we were when the pressure 
was lifted. No prison house perverted the 
vision of the apostles into despair. Out 
from their prison walls came songs, and let¬ 
ters of joyous encouragement to friends 


God’s Deliverances 


61 


far away, and undying testimony to God's 
deliverance, even while in prison they 
seemed to be shut away from deliverance. 
The freedom of the child of God and his 
deliverance from bondage of any sort is not 
a merely outward, but an inward matter, 
and if the inward freedom and the outward 
coincide, the lesser freedom, which is the 
outward, is only an added testimony to the 
freedom of greater reality and prominence, 
which is the inward. 

God's deliverances do not consist in get¬ 
ting us clear of bolts and bars and iron 
gates merely on special occasions. Some of 
the freest spirits are those most severely set 
about by so-called hindrances. His deliver¬ 
ances go back for their beginnings to the 
day when we accepted the great freedom 
offered to those who become the bondslaves 
of Christ, and the deliverances stream 
across life and through it like the dawnlight 
that banishes darkness by its radiance. 


CHAPTER IX 
STANDING STILE 

There is nothing harder for some tem¬ 
peraments than just to wait. It would be 
easier to face a whole army of immediate 
problems than to wait a whole day for a 
single deferred problem to be settled. That 
is the attitude of many of us toward life and 
work, and there are certain characteristics 
that such an attitude denotes which are 
worth examining. 

In the first place, it is hard to wait be¬ 
cause we do not take long views; what we 
want, we want badly and want now. So if 
an answer to a letter is delayed, we wish we 
had asked our friend to telegraph. If a 
train is held up by a snowstorm, not one 
man in ten on that train knows how to 
spend the waiting time profitably or with 
any peace of mind, and the question that 
beats incessantly upon his brain is, “When 
are we going to start?” A young man 
62 


Standing Still 


63 


wants to know what his future financial 
state will be, and sometimes he will under¬ 
mine his usefulness for the immediate duty 
by nervous anxiety over the conditions that 
may obtain ten years hence. It is hard for 
us to take long views, because we are ac¬ 
customed to deal with microscopes instead 
of telescopes in our judgments. 

Some of us never do see things in their 
everlasting relationships; we cannot picture 
to ourselves the river reaching on through 
miles of territory down to the sea, but have 
a mind only to the little eddy in which our 
boat turns around and around. Immediacy 
has its place, but the kind of immediacy 
that counts most is that which works under 
the inspired patience of a long view of 
God's unfolding providences. Some men 
seem able to wait cheerfully as long as God 
prefers that they should wait; others are 
restive under the divine internments, and 
lose whatever value these periods of life 
may have through an unholy impatience to 
know when the next move will be made. 
Mountaineers and sailors often seem irri¬ 
tatingly slow to the tenderfoot or the lands¬ 
man, but men who live with great horizons 
about them learn to take longer views than 


64 When the Days Seem Dark 


those who beat out their strength against 
the alley walls of a narrow life. 

Another reason why we find it hard to 
wait is because we can scarcely believe that 
God is doing any work unless we are busy. 
The spirit of the serene and trustful ser¬ 
vant of God is not fretting over the motions 
made or not made by these human hands of 
ours in any kind of toil. To such there is 
keen joy in taking somewhat the position of 
an alert observer, who, while working with 
the tools that he has, is rejoiced to see how 
the “Master of all good workmen” is carry¬ 
ing forward larger plans for that work¬ 
man’s own life than he himself could ever 
devise. “What hath God wrought!” was 
the message flashed over the first telegraph 
line. That message is needed to-day by 
those of us who think that unless our hands 
are on the experiment or the task the stars 
might cease to move in their orbits. 

There is a very delightful chapter on 
“The Prominent Man” in Mrs. Laura E. 
Richards’ book, “The Golden Windows.” 
While hurrying to business one morning, he 
slipped on a piece of ice, fell, and broke his 
leg. It was to be a big day for him, and 
his very natural outcry was, “What will be- 


Standing Still 


65 


come of everything ?” He was taken to his 
home, and there in his distress he was 
visited by the Angel-Who-Attends-to- 
Things. After inquiring about his state of 
health, the angel advised him not to worry. 

“The truth is,” said the angel, “I put that 
piece of ice there myself; I wanted to get 
rid of you.” 

Then the angel went on to explain that if 
The Prominent Man had attended the meet¬ 
ing that he expected to attend that day, a 
new man whose voice should have been 
heard would not have felt free to speak; 
and if he had given the lecture that he in¬ 
tended to give later in the day on an im¬ 
portant matter affecting large issues, he 
would have done harm. The angel assured 
him that when the crisis was over it would 
be all right for him to deliver the lecture, 
because then it would harm no one. 

“ ‘Am I awake, or is this a dream ?’ cried 
The Prominent Man. 

“ ‘More or less,’ said the angel, ‘it is what 
you call life.’ 

“ ‘But—but—but’-cried the man, 

‘this is terrible; you don’t know anything 
about business.’ 

“ ‘My dear soul,’ said the angel, ‘what do 


5 



66 When the Days Seem Dark 

you take me for?’ and he went away and 
told the nurse to give her patient a com¬ 
posing draught.” 

Some of us are so impressed with our 
own importance that we are forgetting 
God’s importance. We cannot wait for 
him; something must be done, and we are 
the ones to do it. Thus the turmoil of spirit 
goes on and the profitable lesson of waiting 
upon God is not learned. 

When the terrifying vision of Pharaoh’s 
hosts broke upon the uplifted eyes of the 
children of Israel, those same children were 
“sore afraid.” They were in a turmoil of 
anxiety at once. Hadn’t they told Moses 
that he was heading in the wrong direction? 
Hadn’t they told him to let them alone 
where they were, and he had now brought 
them out into an awful fix ? Into that wild 
melee of fear and recrimination and unfaith, 
Moses spoke not a message of vigorous 
action to meet the oncoming disaster, but 
the clear strong words, “Fear ye not, stand 
still, and see the salvation of Jehovah, which 
he will work for you to-day.” In the over¬ 
whelming result, the Israelites appear to 
have had about as much hand as we have in 
many of the things that God does for US, 


Standing Still 


67 


when, for one strong, steadying moment, 
he tells us to stand still and see. 

Standing still on some occasions is the 
paramount duty of the follower of Christ. 
There are times when we must be merely 
onlookers, when the flesh and the brain re¬ 
fuse to work, hopes shrivel like the autumn 
leaves, and we simply do not know which 
way to turn. It may be just then that we 
shall learn for the first time how to stand 
still in perfect peace and quietness of soul, 
not idling away our time, not hopelessly 
limp and heedless of the outcome, but work¬ 
ing on in such ways as may be given to us, 
observing with eager joy the way in which 
God will work it all out to a perfectly 
glorious ending. All our little fussiness and 
haste, all our strong anxiety and warping 
care are as futile as the tugging of a little 
child’s hands at the great iron knob of a 
closed and barred gate through which his 
loving father does not care to have him go 
just then. 

Standing still is often the only way by 
which we go forward, the only way by 
which we will know what God can do for 
such as we are. He is the worker, and the 
sooner we give him that place and are con- 


68 When the Days Seem Dark 


tent to wait when he asks us to wait with¬ 
out evidence of progress, the sooner he will 
be able to send us forward as the forth- 
faring messengers of his own choosing, who 
can wait or go with equal joy. 


CHAPTER X 

WHEN WE ARE DISCOURAGED 

After hard work, depression and the val¬ 
ley beyond the hill. After the doing of a 
great service, a great slump. After elation 
and vision and high altitudes of body and 
spirit, then the tangled swamp. And these 
conditions are taken almost as a matter of 
course, because of temperament, or some 
other scapegoat impostor of the mind’s own 
making. That is the pity of it, that the 
slump of the spirit is supposed to be, if not 
inevitable, at least not so very strange. 

But it is strange that Christians should 
accept such conditions as tamely as some do. 
Many a minister expects blue Monday, and 
he has it. Many a teacher almost counts 
upon being worn out after a session with 
the class nobody else wants. Many a man or 
a woman finishes a big task under pressure 
with a certain self-pitying curiosity as to 
what kind of temporary breakdown is to 
follow. It is supposed to be the common 
69 


70 When the Days Seem Dark 


lot, and like good fatalists some expect the 
worst, and get pretty nearly what they ex¬ 
pect. 

Discouragement, however, and the , de¬ 
pression that so often follows a climax of 
work, are not necessary. The body needs 
no such periods; the mind needs none; the 
spirit is not at home on such low levels. 
What possible reason is there why elation 
must be followed by enervation; and 
triumph by total eclipse of the spirit that 
was an hour ago triumphant? And if there 
is no “must” about it, why submit? Why 
slump ? 

Of course a letting down of special ten¬ 
sion may be needed after a climax of effort, 
but that can be accepted with joy, as rest¬ 
ing time, without the least burden of depres¬ 
sion. A man who must be working all the 
time, and who, like a bicycle rider, cannot 
keep his balance unless he is moving, has 
never learned the simplest principles of a 
just balance between work and rest. If, 
when he ought to rest, he finds himself half 
submerged in a morass of regrets, and 
doubts, and fears, and work is the only 
thing he knows that will hoist him to solid 
ground again, he may as well make up his 


When We Are Discouraged 71 

mind that he knows as little about work as 
he does about rest. He is pathetically un¬ 
prepared for either state. He thinks that 
rest includes the very opposite of rest, de¬ 
pression. He thinks that work is a suffi¬ 
cient cure for disquiet and discouragement. 
He wants to work when he should be rest¬ 
ing, and whether he likes it or not, the time 
comes when he works like a man who badly 
needs rest. Then he is so afraid of the 
depression that usually comes when he eases 
the tension, that he works on in a half-sick 
fashion anyway. No, resting after toil 
need not, must not, include depression. It 
is not the resting that makes the trouble. 

Discouragement, depression, regrets that 
eat out the heart, hopelessness as to the 
future, come to the indolent quite as dis¬ 
tressingly as to the worker. Many an 
idler lives in the very quagmire of such a 
spirit, and to him even work seems to offer 
no lift out of it. For work is not an at¬ 
tractive remedy to him. A traveler in the 
far South shortly after the Civil War, saw 
at several stations on the line a nonchalant 
individual who seemed, to be on the lookout 
for something. Finally the traveler said to 
him: 


72 When the Days Seem Dark 


“Well, my friend, are you looking for 
work down this way ?” 

“Stranger,” replied the other slowly, 
“that’s exactly what I hain’t a-lookin* for!” 

That is also just what some downhearted 
folk “hain’t a-lookin’ for”; and if they 
were, there would be no assurance that hav¬ 
ing found it their depression would be 
cured. 

A discouraged spirit is the symptom of a 
more serious condition of the life than most 
of us will admit to ourselves. Uncomfort¬ 
able though it is, we do not regard that 
symptom with nearly enough dread and re¬ 
pugnance. For back of it, in reality, is a 
subtle distrust of God. The mind at once 
revolts from that assertion. But what other 
reason can explain the depression that seizes 
upon a Christian, whose Heavenly Father 
is the Lord God Almighty ? Can any of us 
seriously believe that if we were wholly 
trusting God to be as good as his promises 
we could find or keep on hand any cause for 
discouragement ? 

Our past sins could not keep us under. 
They are forgotten by him in the light of 
forgiving love. God is not even remember¬ 
ing them, since we accepted his Son’s dis- 


When We Are Discouraged 73 

position of them. Why should we keep 
them in mind? 

Our weakness surely could not depress 
us, for the confiding soul knows that in our 
weakness Christ's strength is rounded out 
into fulness of power. 

Weariness could not draw us down to a 
low spiritual tone, for the tired worker is 
his special yokefellow, and what rest it is 
to companion with him in the furrow! 

Elation of spirit need not then look for a 
collapse, because there could be no height 
greater than the sustained walk, in loving 
confidence, with him. What light of day 
floods the high levels and the gleaming peaks 
of that land of our pilgrimage! Thus one 
of the three favorite songs of the blind and 
dying Ira D. Sankey was “There’ll be no 
Dark Valley When Jesus Comes.” 

The shade of the juniper tree gives way 
to breezy upland sunshine, and the gloom of 
a broken spirit seems like an evil dream 
whose clutch is gone with the waking song 
of birds in the trees outside the window. 

Oh, the shame of it, that we should ever 
doubt Him so! Is it that he has done too 
much for us, so that we become like spoiled 
children? As the gentle-spirited Robert 


74 When the Days Seem Dark 


Barbour wrote: “The Lord’s goodness sur¬ 
rounds us at every moment. I walk through 
it almost with difficulty, as through thick 
grass and flowers.” Distrust of God plays 
havoc with life and work, underlies the 
heartsickness that cuts the sinews of effort. 
And to the Christian discouragement might 
as well be stripped of all disguises, and 
stand out frankly as sheer, undeniable dis¬ 
trust of a loving Father who wants to do 
for us in all things more than we can ask 
or think. 

Why not give him the opportunity he 
seeks to put underneath us the everlasting 
arms? Why not make an end of distrust 
and complaint, of doubt and fear? Why 
not be as joyous as he wishes us to be? 
Why not let him do what he wants to do for 
us and be glad about it ? 


CHAPTER XI 
GOD IS GOOD 

The little girl could not bear to have her 
mother leave her in the dark. Even with 
the sound of the household about her, the 
child was lonely and forlorn. But bedtime 
had come, and in her small bed she must 
remain, while mother went downstairs. 

The mother comforted her as best she 
could, and as she left the room she said, 
quietly, “You know God is right here, dar¬ 
ling, right in this room with you, and so 
you needn’t be lonely.” To that assurance 
the child gave no answer. 

A few moments later the father of the 
family passed by the open door of the room, 
and he heard a rather determined child- 
voice saying something he could not quite 
catch. He listened, and then i heard the 
words: “’Way Dod, ’way Dod!” It was 
plain that the child felt uncomfortable in 
the presence she had been assured was 
there, and wanted Him just to go away! 

75 


76 When the Days Seem Dark 


We who are older never put it in exactly 
those words. Indeed, we would not use 
words at all to expose our feelings on that 
subject. We would perhaps never let our 
mature minds dismiss God so directly, even 
though we might be troubled with just a 
shadow of doubt about his probable good¬ 
ness toward us. Not that we could be 
forced by any one else to admit that our 
Jehovah is not good. We would repudiate 
such disloyalty as that. But some of us do 
not hesitate, by expressions we use, by shake 
of the head, by provision we make for the 
worst, to question whether the goodness of 
God is going to reach down far enough into 
our needs to deal properly with them. Ab¬ 
stractly, we insist that he is good. Con¬ 
cretely, we wonder whether his goodness will 
apply to our case. He is to many remote 
and theoretical and no great comfort in the 
dark,—and even perhaps a bit terrifying. 

But in the older day of Jehovah’s self¬ 
revelation to his chosen people his goodness 
was the distinguishing characteristic taught 
by law and by prophet. It was a goodness 
without stain, without concession to the 
popular notions of deity evidenced in 
heathen beliefs. Jehovah’s goodness was 


God Is Good 


77 


not only unstained, but it was exceedingly 
patient and long-suffering, open to entreaty, 
recognizing the weaknesses of man in order 
to their cure, and hopeful about man in¬ 
finitely beyond any reason that man could 
find in himself for such hope. 

In his goodness, his righteousness, lay 
the eternal unchanging distinction between 
the God revealed to Israel, and the number¬ 
less gods of the heathen round about Israel. 
Jehovah’s goodness required the separation 
of his people from the contamination of the 
surrounding nations, as he looked along the 
years of training he had planned for those 
through whom he would chiefly work. It 
was not a remote and forbidding righteous¬ 
ness, but a righteousness rich in invitation, 
in entreaty, in promise, in comfort, and in 
reward to those who would accept it from 
him. 

In a later day the founder of modern 
philosophy, Rene Descartes based his belief 
in God upon the revelation that he dis¬ 
covered in his own soul. He found within 
himself a conception of a perfect being. He 
reasoned that he as an imperfect being 
could never through imperfections have con¬ 
ceived of a perfect being, but that this 


78 When the Days Seem Dark 


Being must have been revealed to him from 
without his own soul. The very fact that he 
could have consciousness of a perfectly 
good Being was proof to him that such a 
Being, from whom alone such consciousness 
could come, must exist. Hence the very be¬ 
lief in the existence of God was in the 
reasoning of this thinker founded upon a 
revelation of an ideal perfection. 

Now we may accept the testimony of 
■the Word, and the findings of thoughtful 
men of open mind without debate as to the 
goodness of God in himself, but where we 
stumble, strangely enough, is at the 
threshold of the happy conviction that his 
goodness, with all its aspects, is at work for 
us. It is not a theological generalization; 
it is glowing personal experience of the 
souks fellowship with Jehovah,—this good¬ 
ness of God. The only reason we have ever 
doubted the practical reach of that goodness 
•is a disagreement on our part with God's 
wisdom. He does something, or waits to 
do something, where our judgment or feel¬ 
ings would have suggested another course, 
and we begin to doubt his goodness, per¬ 
haps on the side of kindliness, or even on 
the side of eternal love. 


God Is Good 


79 


If we will only reflect upon the facts we 
shall see that the only element in the uni¬ 
verse with which God is what man would 
call severe and drastic is that abhorrent 
thing called sin. Some men dispute God’s 
right to deal with sin as he does in some of 
its manifestations, and they frankly dis¬ 
count his goodness because of his severity 
just here. But if it were possible for us to 
see sin as God sees it, is it probable that we 
would then wonder at any of his moves 
against it? Even with our muddy notions 
of what sin is, would we venture to suggest 
that it ought to come in for more gentle 
treatment from Jehovah? If God were not 
severe with sin, how could he be good in 
himself or toward man? 

The man who talks about being “re¬ 
signed,” and who with mournful voice hope¬ 
lessly admits that he “can do nothing more, 
and is now in God’s hands” has no concep¬ 
tion whatever of the yearning, insistent, 
overflowing goodness of God that is press¬ 
ing upon his life like a flood upon the gates 
that hold the water back from a drought- 
stricken land. 

Out in China at a missionary’s table two 
little children used to bow their heads when 


80 When the Days Seem Dark 


grace was said, and give thanks in song. 
Across more than half a world they came 
to the homeland, and here the little 
children of that family in whatever home 
they found themselves would sing their 
song of gratitude. There was no doubt or 
hesitation when they were asked to give 
thanks. And these are the words they sing: 

“God is great, God is good, 

And we thank him for this food. 

By his hand, we all are fed; 

Give us, Lord, our daily bread.” 

Would it not gladden the heart of God 
if we of an older generation should put 
aside our doubts, our debates, our unworthy 
fears, and let such a song as that rise from 
childlike hearts, as we remember his good¬ 
ness? 


CHAPTER XII 
HIS PATIENT LOVE 

Night was upon the city, and the children 
of darkness were in the streets. A mother 
moved slowly along in the crowd, looking 
eagerly and anxiously into the faces of 
those who passed, and whenever the swing¬ 
ing door of a saloon flashed a glare across 
the pavement, she turned quickly to look 
within the place where she thought perhaps 
her son might be. 

She was searching for him, searching 
with motherly disregard of her surround¬ 
ings, intent upon taking him home. That 
was her one mission in the crowd, to find 
and to take home her son. She found him 
at last, a pitiable figure; and he had no de¬ 
sire to go home. He had broken with his 
ideals, he had cast love to the winds, and 
the bestial in him held the reins and the 
whip. 

But in that mother’s heart was a passion 
81 


6 


82 When the Days Seem Dark 


stronger than the beast in the boy, a love 
so determined in its purpose, SO' compelling 
in its steady pull upon the boy, that he did 
go home in spite of the tug of his lusts. 
Then, as before, and afterwards, the cry of 
that mother in prayer and in any voicing 
of her love for him was ever the same: “I 
cannot, cannot, let him go!” Nor did she let 
him go until from a clean life, moving 
quietly on day by day, the Lord took him 
out of the fight. 

What that mother did for her son, is done 
for every one of us day by day. If we were 
to be held back from sin merely by our own 
preferences, our family surroundings, our 
sense of propriety, or even by love for a 
very dear friend, we could not hope for any 
real freedom from the dominance of low 
and mastering passions. Unstable as we 
are at the best, no power of will, no uplift 
of heredity, no steadying star of a love that 
proceeds from ourselves, could save us from 
blunders and wreckage all along the way. 

Our love for God is weakened by our 
weaknesses, and neither that nor any of the 
lesser, cherished helps could alone win us 
homeward when we have gone away into 
the bondage of sin. If God should let our 


His Patient Love 


83 


case rest wholly on our wavering purpose 
in unsteadily seeking him, what hope would 
there be for any of us? 

But God is seeking us, and he does not 
purpose to let us go. We turn to our own 
ways; he patiently waits. We strain away 
from his leading. One man longs to be in 
some other profession than the one to which 
God has called him. Another wishes that 
he might escape from burdens which, if he 
but knew it, are already making a man of 
him. Another is unsettled in his doings 
because he is not some one else. And the 
Father patiently waits, and will not let 
us go. 

Men weary of the struggle. Things they 
have preached do not seem to work out in 
practise. High standards in business are 
well enough in books and speeches, but how 
about that moment when everything will 
go to pieces unless the standard is let down 
to a “reasonable” point? And when they 
are tired of doing the hard, right thing, and 
the standard is lowered, lowered always 
more at such a time than a man intends, 
God is yet patient, and in his love has no 
mind to let the man go utterly down to the 
alluring low levels. Even though the man 


84 When the Days Seem Dark 


has lost his clear vision of God, the Father 
does not lose his clear thought of what that 
man ought to be, and can be. 

It is well for us that this is so. If God 
were passive in his willingness to train and 
to save mankind, mankind would be at the 
mercy of forces that are not passive. If 
God sought the man no more than man 
seeks God, man would get farther and far¬ 
ther away from God. If the mother had 
not wanted the boy to go home, far more 
urgently than the boy himself wanted to go, 
the boy would hardly have found a way to 
go. Not his love for her so much as her 
love for him was the compelling, restraining 
cause of his return. 

In his farewell conversation with his dis¬ 
ciples, the Son of God, with tender solici¬ 
tude, spoke very plainly with them about his 
relation to them, and theirs to him. Noth¬ 
ing less than the oneness of the vine with 
its branches was enough to illustrate his 
thought of that relation. He would not 
have these followers of his think of them¬ 
selves now as other than intimate friends, 
to whom he had confided what the Father 
had confided to him. And he calls to their 
attention one great fact of their relationship 



His Patient Love 


85 


which they might easily have overlooked, a 
fact which he clearly intended should be re¬ 
assuring to them in the new responsibilities 
which were to come upon them. “Ye did 
not choose me/’ he said, “but I chose you, 
and appointed you, that ye should go and 
bear fruit, and that your fruit should 
abide/’ 

Their opportunity, frail and variable as 
these men were, had been of the Master’s 
choosing, and he had held on to them with 
patience and forbearance in spite of their 
doubts and questionings, and their short¬ 
sighted understanding of him. 

Here is equal assurance for every one of 
us. Love chooses us, even when the weak¬ 
nesses within us utter protest; love assures 
responsibility for the choice; and love con¬ 
tinues patiently to cherish us into the bear¬ 
ing of an abiding fruit. Why then should 
any of us be hopeless over yesterday’s fail¬ 
ure, or fearful of to-day’s fight? 

“O Love that wilt not let me go, 

I rest my weary soul in Thee; 

I give Thee back the life I owe, 

That in Thine ocean’s depths its flow 
May richer, fuller be.” 


CHAPTER XIII 

“AND BREAKING IT HE GAVE 
TO THEM” 

To the bewildered disciples the days after 
Calvary were dark with the remembrance 
of a lost cause and a lost Christ. He to 
whom they had given themselves, abandon¬ 
ing all for him, had come upon evil days, 
and life for them was filled with amazed 
forebodings, and with keen grief over the 
loss of a friend like unto no other friend 
they had ever known. 

Two of them were on their way to Em- 
maus, puzzled by doubts, communing to¬ 
gether, questioning each the other, when 
they were joined by one whom they did not 
recognize. But he at once was on close 
terms with them. Before long he was lead¬ 
ing in the conversation, rehearsing the 
reasonableness of the great events that were 
so baffling to them. So drawn to him were 
they that they constrained him to remain 
with them at the day’s close. Their hearts 
86 


The Broken Bread 


87 


were stirred by what he had said to them on 
the way. They could not let him go from 
them yet. 

As they sat down together for the even¬ 
ing meal “he took the bread and blessed; 
and breaking it he gave to them.” What 
was it that suddenly disclosed to them their 
lost Christ? It was like him to bless and to 
give. Did they see a gesture, catch an in¬ 
flection of the dear voice, perceive an ex¬ 
pression of that beloved countenance, re¬ 
calling precious memories so clearly that 
they could not mistake the identity of their 
guest? “Their eyes were opened, and they 
knew him.” That was enough. It was a 
profound experience, this return of the 
crucified Master of their lives. They must 
communicate it to others forthwith. And 
when in Jerusalem “they rehearsed the 
things that had happened in the way,” they 
explained that the Lord was disclosed to 
them “in the breaking of the bread.” By 
this familiar covenant act, in the simple pro¬ 
vision of the hour at the end of that road 
to a new experience, the Master made 
known his living presence, dispelling their 
doubt and turning their questionings into 
eager declaration of their experience. 


88 When the Days Seem Dark 


Even the crudest materialist will not miss 
the intent of the scene at the end of that 
weary day. The hungry, desolate disciples 
are there. The evening meal is ready. The 
stranger is blessing the food. But these 
men have a hunger that the bread can never 
satisfy. The depth of the experience of 
that evening, infinitely deeper than any 
gratitude for material gifts, is in the re¬ 
stored, the living, the immediate Christ, to 
whom the flame of their love leaps forth in 
this hour of overjoyed and blessed surprise. 
Christ is the glowing, glad reality, the living 
Bread, before their opened eyes. 

But while the intent of that scene will not 
be missed, there are many to-day whose 
eyes are still not opened to the presence of 
the Christ with his outstretched, pierced 
hands, while the merely material means of 
his revealing of himself are so valued that 
they obscure the Christ himself. The bread 
on the table is regarded with satisfaction by 
its possessor. The spiritual significance of 
the fact that it is there at all is, with many, 
hardly a fleeting thought. Indeed, one of 
our perils as individuals and as nations is 
that we are liable to have thankfulness in 
proportion to the quantity of material in our 


The Broken Bread 


89 


possession, rather than an outright, un¬ 
measured, and unbargained thankfulness 
for the great realities of the spiritual life 
that we cannot weigh by the pound. The 
disciples at Emmaus were undoubtedly 
grateful for the bread placed before them; 
but the bread did not obscure the great 
spiritual fact of Christ. 

There is nothing more irregular^ shifting, 
and changeful than material possessions as 
a basis for gratitude; for the instability of 
the things themselves and the uncertainty as 
to whether they are to prove a blessing or a 
curse leave us quite in the dark as to any 
unvarying test of their real value to the 
individual. A good farm may be a bad gift 
to one man, while a poor farm may be a 
good gift to another. A very profitable 
business may wreck one man, while a strug¬ 
gling enterprise may be the making of an¬ 
other man. The mere having of a certain 
quantity of goods is wholly problematical as 
a standard cause for gratitude. Yet we are 
liable to count up our individual and national 
causes for thankfulness chiefly in material 
terms. 

But whatever the uncertainties of ma¬ 
terial holdings, there are great spiritual 


90 When the Days Seem Dark 


•verities ready for all, pressing in upon 
every life in a thousand ways, and measured 
only in the terms of infinity. It is a glorious 
fact that the best in life is freely offered to 
every soul. While material possessions are 
elusive, and gained by unending toil, spirit¬ 
ual things not only are not withheld, but 
they crowd in upon us in lavish, outpoured 
wealth of loving provision. They are not 
won in the rough-handed competition of a 
few dynamic souls, but are simply to be 
received in quiet, yielding faith, alike by 
the most masterful, or the most frail and 
unaggressive personality. The lesser values 
are open to a few dominating spirits driving 
on to their chosen material goal. The eter¬ 
nal and supreme values are not only open 
to all, but are pressed upon all with loving, 
patient insistence. 

One man approaches Thanksgiving Day 
with little joy in his heart. He has no 
bumper crops on his land. He has worked 
hard and faithfully, too. He drives the old 
horse and buggy even yet, while his neigh¬ 
bors roar past him in automobiles. He 
almost wishes that the president would 
name a day of thanksgiving no more, be¬ 
cause that day makes a man think of what 


The Broken Bread 


91 


he has not quite as much as of what he has. 
Another has added farm to farm, until his 
cares have been multiplied ten-fold. He 
sees little now of his wife or children. He 
has grown rich in money and lands. And 
yet as Thanksgiving Day draws near he 
recoils from its observance, because his pos¬ 
sessions are so meaningless to him in the 
shadow of what they have cost his own 
inner life, and his family. Both these men 
are using false measures, and each is piti¬ 
fully needy at the heart of his life. 

It is a glorious fact that the Christ who 
is abundantly adequate to the need of every 
life is not so much a possession offered to 
all, as he is a possessor. Unless this were 
true, our ability to lay hold upon him would 
be the disappointing measure of our posses¬ 
sion of him. He is not only ready to enter 
into every life, but he wills to in-fill that 
life with his own, so that he may com¬ 
pletely control the whole being into which 
he has been received. The restored Christ 
at Emmaus was a restored Master, who 
would take charge of these bewildered men. 
He had never been absent from them. Only 
by accommodation of language can it be 
said that he was restored to them. It was 


92 When the Days Seem Dark 


rather that they were brought, in their great 
need, back to him. 

Thanksgiving even for the supreme 
spiritual gift does not, then, find its source 
in a sense of what we hold as our own, but 
far more in the knowledge that we who are 
so easily bewildered by empty and alluring 
aims are held, if we are willing, by the risen, 
living Lord, in balanced sanity and service 
through his indwelling. Not what we 
have in our keeping, but the blessed fact that 
Christ has us in his keeping, quickens us to 
proclaim each new day a day of thanksgiv¬ 
ing, in abiding confidence and joy. 


CHAPTER XIV 

THE REACTION OF THE 
CRITICAL SPIRIT 

The most pathetic victim of the critical 
spirit is the habitual critic himself. Answer¬ 
ing the invitation of human frailty in 
others, he has yielded to the temptation of 
pointing out defects until his own vision be¬ 
comes defective in ability to see anything 
else. His alertness for blemishes, his sen¬ 
sitiveness to whatever has gone wrong as he 
sees it, become so highly developed that the 
refinements of character around him, the 
glory of God shining in a human face, seem 
unreal to him, or at least only incidental, 
and his mind, suffering from acute criticitis, 
darts like a hawk at its prey. 

It may take years of practise to produce 
an out-and-out critic of the destructive sort, 
who lives a life of misanthropic elation over 
his exploits, and who cares little for his loss 
of power in appreciative seeing. To some 
93 


94 When the Days Seem Dark 


■'O 


there is a curiously alluring delight in the 
ability to find flaws, to point out how un¬ 
lovely the beautiful really is, to let no one 
enjoy anything with unalloyed happiness. 
And that delight is a terribly subtle poison, 
because such pride is taken in the very 
faculty that destroys the higher vision, and 
throws into contempt the generous, uncal¬ 
culating estimates that enlarge the soul. 
The elation that comes from striking off 
keen cynicisms is the lure that misleads 
many into a growing hardness of attitude 
toward others and toward life. 

There are some in whose presence we 
hardly dare to become enthusiastic because 
any gladness of soul only invites bitter or 
ironical criticism. But the most profound 
harm enters thereby, not into the soul 
of the suppressed enthusiast but into the 
being of the man who has been unwilling 
that there should be any unqualified en¬ 
thusiasm anywhere near him. He it is who 
suffers most, loses most, is most to be pitied, 
because the best impulses of his heart have 
been so blunted and even destroyed. The 
reaction upon him is far heavier than the 
action upon the heart of another. In the 
critic the springs are dry; in the other the 


The Critical Spirit 


95 


springs, though closed for a moment, flow 
on again and are cleared by the flow. 

There are some who earnestly believe that 
they are simply looking at men and things 
with level eyes when they see in the large 
the sins of men and the defects of things. 
They hold that these matters ought not to 
be overlooked in our estimates, and that 
only fools shut their eyes to the facts. Some¬ 
times, indeed, we are as great fools when 
we fail to do this as when we do it. There 
are occasions when we must use all possible 
perception and sagacity in measuring others, 
weighing all the factors we can discern, as 
when an employer chooses a helper, or a 
people a leader. But no employer whose 
habit of mind is to see chiefly the bad in 
others can possibly know with any accuracy 
when he has a good applicant before him, 
or a good worker in his service. The re¬ 
action of that habit makes him sensitive to 
what he does not want, and insensitive to 
what he does want. 

The church that seeks a pastor, and has 
freely indulged the critical spirit for any 
length of time, gets into a condition of mind 
and heart wherein is small hope for choos¬ 
ing a pastor who has the needed qualifica- 


96 When the Days Seem Dark 


tions, because that church has destroyed its 
own power of discernment in the realm of 
wise choices on a high spiritual plane. The 
reaction of the critical spirit in that case 
makes it almost impossible for the church 
to find a leader with the qualities most 
needed just there, because it becomes so 
hard to appreciate or recognize him when 
found. A congregation in which the spirit 
of criticism of the pastor and of one an¬ 
other is abroad among the people needs a 
miracle of grace to revive it into a condi¬ 
tion which will justify a pastor in thinking 
the aggregation is a church at all. 

And what reaction there is upon many a 
man who is keenly critical in his home life! 
He speaks his mind, to be sure, and he 
prides himself on his frankness. His children 
gradually give up the glad bringing of 
affairs to him just for a talk about them, 
because he is so sure to find a flaw some¬ 
where, and discourse about it, when they 
know all the time about the flaw, and only 
just wanted a happy friendly time with 
father. His wife ceases to consult him 
about some problems on which she herself 
is clear enough, but over which he always 
thinks it necessary to become impressive. 


97 


The Critical Spirit 

All she wanted was encouragement; and 
what she got was criticism, already taken 
fully into account, and a heartache beneath 
a dutiful attention to his—vaporings, any 
one else would call them, but not she. That 
father’s step on the walk at evening starts 
none of the children scurrying to the door 
to welcome him. No, there are things 
father won’t like, they are sure, as soon as 
he steps within the door, and they wonder 
just what the particular things will be to¬ 
night. It’s just father’s way, after all, and 
he really does get a good welcome from his 
lenient and considerate household. But oh, 
the reaction on the man in unloveliness of 
character, in austerity, in needless burdens, 
in growing hardness of heart! 

If the reaction is like this in our human 
relationship, what of that hidden relation¬ 
ship to Christ that constitutes life in its 
normal state? Is it possible that a man 
may be in true fellowship with Him, and 
yet find any intellectual or spiritual satis¬ 
faction in saying smartly critical things? 
There are times when a man must speak 
other words than words of praise, but the 
admission of that fact ought not to give an 
excuse for indulgence in criticism as a 


7 


•'o 


98 When the Days Seem Dark 

luxury. It is not enough in considering the 
possibilities of fellowship with Christ to say 
that he was a very direct critic, and hence 
his followers may rightly follow him in 
that Our Lord could speak as man cannot 
speak, and no man can take up the whip of 
criticism with grim delight, and lash right 
and left with it, on the ground that his en¬ 
joyment of the process makes him more 
like Christ. Our Lord never gives one the 
impression that he is getting personal enjoy¬ 
ment out of his own drastic criticism of 
others, but he speaks with high authority 
and dignity because he must speak “straight 
as a line of light,” or with a breaking heart 
of love over the sins of man. We cannot 
justify our captiousness by his words, or the 
unholy joy of the smart critic or gossip- 
monger by anything in him. Indulgence in 
these things shatters any true fellowship 
with him, because such things are not of 
him. That is a reaction of the critical 
spirit which men often overlook when be¬ 
moaning their sense of remoteness from 
God. 

Is the calm and experienced counsel of 
Paul too tame and impractical for strong 
natures of to-day? Or might not some of 


The Critical Spirit 


99 


us show more true strength in Christlikeness 
if we were to follow that counsel,—“Breth¬ 
ren, even if a man be overtaken in any 
trespass,”—yes, caught in the very act,— 
“ye who are spiritual, restore such a one in 
a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself, 
lest thou also be tempted.” 

“Come, children, let us go! 

We travel hand in hand; 

Each in his brother finds his joy 
In this wild stranger land. 

The strong be quick to raise 
The weaker when they fall; 

Let love and peace and patience bloom 
In ready help for all.” 


CHAPTER XV 
TWO LISTS 


A man was lying awake in the night. He 
had been awake for a long time, and his 
thoughts had traveled far. A third of a 
century had unrolled its panorama of 
events before him. The picture had many 
lights and shadows, hills and valleys, and 
the signs of many summers and winters 
upon it. 

The man had been recounting one by one 
the events that stood out most sharply in 
his memory, and he had become heavy- 
hearted in the process. All life had taken 
on the gray hue of a sea under the murk of 
brewing weather, and the list of painful ex¬ 
periences had lengthened like the long dark 
line of distant wind coming across the 
waters. The sense of inescapable stress of 
soul and body had become oppressive as he 
lay there in the dark, and the more the list 
grew the less resistance his spirit could 
bring to bear upon the depressing reaction 
100 


Two Lists 


101 


following the mental compilation of calam¬ 
ity. 

Bereavements were remembered, some of 
them marked by sudden and violent strokes. 
Personal failures seemed almost numberless 
as the man reviewed the years, and some 
of them now seemed so stupid and needless 
and black! On the slack tides of energy 
that flow sluggishly in the hours just before 
dawn the driftwood of wasted days moved 
in monotonous eddies, and the sight of it 
became almost intolerable. 

Then the man began to make out another 
list in his mind. It would never do to count 
up the years in terms of regret. The pic¬ 
ture surely had its lights as well as its 
shadows. Many shining moments emerged, 
—boyhood days on land and sea; uniting 
with the church; college honors in class¬ 
room and on the cinder-path; the enthusi¬ 
asms of business beginnings; the wedding; 
and the faces of happy children. Followed 
the march of events in middle life, with 
wide travel and growing interest in world- 
movements, and multiplied friendships in 
many lands. Why, how the list grows and 
glows as item after item is mentally noted! 

However, it did not seem to compare in 


102 When the Days Seem Dark 


length with the first list. Look at the sec¬ 
ond as long as he would, his mind would re¬ 
vert heavily to the first, and back and forth 
over the things that hurt he would move 
with brooding wonder and only half- 
smothered rebellion. Why should life be 
worked out with any such painful factors? 
Why not a more open road, and flooding 
sunshine over more of the journey? 

It began to dawn upon the man that he 
ought to be ashamed of himself. That was 
the downright English of it. He had been 
a poor artist, a poor compiler, and neglect¬ 
ful. What was the point in tabulating 
troubles? Was it not the subtle pleasure 
that the neurotic finds in self-pity? Any¬ 
body could whine out a list of calamities 
and get weak in the knees at the thought of 
a future like the past. But what business 
had a Christian man to compile his troubles, 
his failures, his regrets, for consideration 
about two o’clock in the morning, or at any 
other time ? Such stuff does not make good 
material for life’s landmarks. When we get 
into the habit of counting time by the 
strokes of calamity that clang like firebells 
upon our consciousness it is time for us to 
do a little real remembering. 


Two Lists 


103 


For, like the man in the dark, we in the 
night or day often leave our two lists quite 
incomplete. They ought to be overwritten 
with the fact of God's love. You cannot 
make a list of life's doings and omit that 
without strange and heart-breaking results. 
You cannot interpret either the good or the 
bad list without God. If we attempt to bal¬ 
ance the untoward and the friendly events 
of life our judgment fails anyway, and when 
we have done what we can we have meas¬ 
ured nothing. All our lists of life's events 
are hopelessly muddled unless God's love is 
there to straighten them out. 

Thus the man began to reason; and it was 
more than reasoning, for “the love of God 
is wider than the measure of man's mind.' , 
Morbid inclinations cannot withstand the 
sweep of that love moving with cleansing 
and refreshing and renewing through life. 
He saw that apart from deliberate or known 
sin in the life, the two lists are not accur¬ 
ately separable by any human judgment of 
their value, but are blended in a record of 
mercy and love beyond the refinements of 
man's definition. A neurotic analysis of 
events has no true color or reason under the 
white light of love eternal and unchanging. 


104 When the Days Seem Dark 


The flesh may recoil from pain, and the 
spirit shrink from some of its contacts with 
repugnant occurrences, but in the end there 
is no sound and satisfying classification of 
events other than under the general head of 
God’s love. 

Our mature judgments often suffer re¬ 
buke in the word of a little child. One 
evening at the dinner table this same man 
saw his little five-year-old girl slip down 
from her chair and walk quietly around to 
him. She climbed up beside him, put her 
arms around his neck, and whispered some¬ 
thing to him. He could not hear what she 
said. How deaf we are to the unexpectedly 
fine sounds! 

“Won’t you just stand beside me, where 
I can see you, and say that again ?” he said. 

The child did as he asked, and looking 
into his face *she said once more the 
whispered words. Then he saw and heard, 
too, and his heart leaped. For the child had 
said only this: 

“Sweeter as the years go by.” 

“Why, dearie,” exclaimed the man, “do 
you know that hymn ?” 

“I know one verse of it,” she answered 
brightly. 


Two Lists 


105 


“Then say it for us, won’t you?’’ And 
the child stood back a little, and in clear 
tones repeated just the same words again. 
To her they were the whole verse. 

To the man they were the whole answer 
to the spirit of disquiet, and they seemed to 
carry him and those around the table into 
a large and sunny upland country where 
the winds of heaven blow freely across a 
happy land whose people, because they are 
God’s people, see all in the light of his un¬ 
failing love. 


CHAPTER XVI 


ATTACKING THE 
DISAGREEABLE DUTY 

Every one shrinks from doing a disagree¬ 
able duty. Flesh and spirit recoil at the 
very thought of contact with the rasp of a 
file or the bite of an acid. Hence it is that 
the duty we do not like, the duty in the 
doing of which we foresee unpleasant sen¬ 
sations, we defer as long as we dare in order 
to brace ourselves to meet the shock. And 
it is quite probable that we shall spend so 
much thought and energy in getting the 
props well set that we shall have no strength 
left for the real encounter. The last, the 
most costly, the most exhausting way to 
deal with a disagreeable duty is to put it off 
until we have strength to meet it. 

A woman finds herself with a surly, or 
unwilling, or incapable, helper in the house¬ 
hold work. What can she do? Help is 
scarce. The housework must be done. If 


106 


The Disagreeable Duty 


107 


she says a word, there may be a scene, and 
a departure. Yet in her heart that troubled 
housekeeper knows that she must eventually 
do one of three things,—train the helper, 
dismiss her, or let the household run at loose 
ends. Each one of these ways has its pain¬ 
ful features, the last the worst of all and 
most dreaded. Yet the possible friction and 
unpleasantness of either of the first two 
ways of escape push both so far into the 
future from day to day that the last, which 
is the worst of all situations to the house¬ 
keeper, comes to be true in that home, and 
chaos reigns. One of the three plans must 
be tried at one time or another. The last, 
which the housekeeper would not tolerate 
at first, becomes a fact, because training or 
dismissal have been deferred. The dis¬ 
agreeable duty not done has become no less 
disagreeable with the passing days. 

A' boy of considerable promise in a busi¬ 
ness office was expected to file in its proper 
order, every day, the large incoming mail 
of the concern. It was a tedious task, but 
easily done in a few hours of close applica¬ 
tion. But it was a disagreeable duty. The 
boy conceived a dislike for it. He evaded it, 
postponed it, complained over it, and finally 


108 When the Days Seem Dark 


so deeply had the poison entered into his 
habits that he became almost helpless in the 
doing of anything promptly, and lost his 
position. It was a blow to him and a dis¬ 
appointment to his friends. Yet his deter¬ 
mination to confine himself as much as pos¬ 
sible to the agreeable duties of his place was 
bound to cost him heavily in the end. 

A school-boy, on the other hand, to whom 
algebra was actual distress, made up his 
mind that he would no longer claim the ex¬ 
clusive right to the foot of the class, a posi¬ 
tion where he had made a deep rut for 
himself, but would stand first or know the 
reason why. Then the struggle began. It 
was never easy, but he never was at the foot 
again. Gradually the principles were 
mastered, the examples worked out by dint 
of disagreeable digging and in spite of fre¬ 
quent inward revolt, until the boy was the 
acknowledged rival of an exceptionally able 
mathematician in the struggle for first place. 
He never won first place permanently, and 
he never learned to like algebra; but he did 
learn the gain of doing a disagreeable* duty, 
which is a lesson not second to algebra. 

When a thing ought to be done, the ques¬ 
tion of whether we enjoy doing it or not has 


The Disagreeable Duty 109 


no rightful place in our thought. And the 
thing we dislike is not liked more at the end 
of a long and apprehensive examination of 
it than at the beginning. The longer we 
think about the painful, uncomfortable side 
of any duty, the more that side of it comes 
into prominence, and the harder it becomes 
to attend to that duty. 

If a man fears the painful and disagree¬ 
able effects of breaking a habit which he 
knows it is his duty to break, he will often 
cling to that wrong habit because he prefers 
wrong-doing to inconvenience and discom¬ 
fort. He will not always put it so harshly 
to himself, but he knows that his choice of 
the habit, as over against his choice of duty, 
means only one thing—moral cowardice. 
The expectation of personal discomfort, the 
fear of pain, lead him to make daily choices 
in favor of wrong-doing, with the fitful pur¬ 
pose of some day breaking that habit, but 
meanwhile locking its chains about him with 
increasing, binding pressure on character, 
until that unmanly shrinking from the dis¬ 
agreeable may work his ruin. And what 
course, in the long run, could possibly bring 
more of the unpleasant, more of the harrow¬ 
ing and distressing, into his life than the 


110 When the Days Seem Dark 


surrender of his manhood to his fears? 

The shrinking of flesh and spirit from the 
disagreeable duty needs to be met with the 
same determined moral courage as any other 
moral weakness. It may be that the thing 
one dislikes will never cease to be disliked. 
It may be that the man who would like to 
be in another business, the woman who is 
bearing up as best she can under the ways 
of a selfish husband, the minister whose sur¬ 
roundings are now and may continue to be 
distasteful,—it may be that these and others 
like them cannot rightfully turn aside from 
their daily disagreeable associations. But 
the sure way to make the situation as hard 
and as trying as possible is to dodge and 
defer the unpleasant duties one is called 
upon to perform. The tasks of an uncon¬ 
genial business must be done promptly and 
thoroughly, or that business will fail; the 
selfish husband needs help, if any man on 
earth needs it; the mean-spirited, back-biting 
person in the minister’s congregation who 
criticises him so unmercifully must not be 
anathema to him, but a challenge to his high¬ 
est attainments in spirit and character. 
Everywhere, in every walk of life, the 
shrinking from doing what one ought to do, 


The Disagreeable Duty 1 11 

the distaste for duty when duty brings pain, 
calls for relentless resistance. 

The power of resistance just here is a 
mark of character. The weakling dodges 
the disagreeable because he dislikes it, and 
becomes more a weakling in so doing. The 
strong soul tackles the disagreeable even 
though disliking it, and becomes stronger 
in so doing. He will not risk the breaking 
down of character by measuring life accord¬ 
ing to ease or hardness, or duty by the pleas¬ 
ant or unpleasant. “Ought” is a mighty 
word with him, and it drives him through 
to his haven as the engines of the ocean 
liner drive her straight through the smoking 
seas of the winter North Atlantic. But the 
weakling steers timidly, is taken aback, falls 
into the trough of the sea, is dismasted, and 
becomes a derelict, drifting with sodden 
flounderings, awash at the will of the wind 
and sea. 

Who of us would willingly choose the 
fate of the derelict? And to choose is ours. 
If love of ease and pleasantness sways us, 
we are at the mercy of the evil within and 
around us. If love of duty-doing, duty 
pleasant or disagreeable, possesses us, drives 
us under so high a pressure of Godward 


1 12 When the Days Seem Dark 


obligation that we get at the thing to be 
done without stopping to wonder whether it 
will hurt or not, evil will meet with a resist¬ 
ance not found in the man whose shrinking 
from pain makes him a laggard and faith¬ 
less. 


CHAPTER XVII 


“THEY TOIL NOT, NEITHER DO 
THEY SPIN” 

He was a very nervous man, even for an 
American. His table companions, in the 
big dining room of the sanitarium, could 
easily see that. He could seldom sit 
through the quick service of the meals that 
he ordered. A nibble here and there at his 
food, and then up he would jump, and out 
of the dining room he would go, quite un¬ 
able to stand the strain of any waiting. He 
was just an overwrought business machine. 

But the man loved flowers. In the center 
of the table were freshly cut flowers or 
growing plants. Every day during his so¬ 
journ at the sanitarium he saw to it that 
they were there, without fail. When one 
of his table mates expressed appreciation of 
this, he said hurriedly, with a shadowy 
smile, “Yes, I always have flowers on the 
table at home.” 


8 


113 


1 14 When the Days Seem Dark 

One day he was suddenly called away by 
a telegram, and he went without delay, be¬ 
queathing to the table a beautiful budding 
amaryllis, which he had just ordered. The 
plant was quite large, and in its serenity and 
substantial strength seemed to be a reminder 
of what its owner might have been. 

The lily slowly unfolded day after day, 
until its brilliant coloring could be seen 
across the spacious room, in which scores 
of men and women gathered at meals. If 
you had glanced around that room you 
would not have supposed that you were 
looking out upon a group of persons, practi¬ 
cally all of whom were suffering with one 
form or another of bodily ailment. A closer 
look into tired eyes or a little talk with some 
in that company would have revealed anew 
the fact that many a man or woman goes 
bravely on with life’s duties without letting 
the outside world know very much about the 
inner grief and suffering. 

A long spell of dreary weather had been 
depressing to many in the sanitarium. The 
clouds and the rain, and the rain and the 
clouds, with more rain, had gloomily shut 
out the sky and turned the good roads into 
mud for many days. It was a bit hard to 


“They Toil Not’ 


115 


keep the sun shining in one’s spirit, espe¬ 
cially when pain or disappointment, or fear 
of the days to come, had as a background 
the dreary landscape veiled in rain. The 
sun cleared a shining way for itself at last, 
the clouds fled over the edge of the world, 
and life seemed cheerier. 

One evening, when the dining room was 
quite full, the sun hung low in the west, and 
sent its beams far across the tables where 
so many ill and despondent and burdened 
people were trying to seem quite the oppo¬ 
site. Suddenly the lily seemed to glow with 
heavenly light. A sunbeam, coming through 
a western window, reached halfway down 
the long room and rested fairly on that lily. 
And the amaryllis gathered to itself, and 
sent back into the room, a glory that touched 
its own glorious colors with gold. Indeed, to 
those who began to notice the glowing 
flower, it seemed as though that beam of 
light rested only on the open bell of the lily, 
as the flame of color hung above the snowy 
cloth of the table. 

A curious silence fell upon the guests in 
that room. Eager eyes sought the shining 
flower. Faces were turned toward it, sad 
and weary faces, that were gradually trans- 


1 16 When the Days Seem Dark 

* s 

formed as they gazed. For the lily spoke so 
clearly a message of good cheer, trust, and 
God's lavish care that even the heavy- 
hearted and well-nigh hopeless could not 
miss that shining lesson. Some rose from 
their places and came over to the table, where 
they might look more closely at that won¬ 
derful sun-touched flower, and they talked 
in low voices about it, and smiled at one 
another because of the radiance in which 
they stood. 

What has become of the nervous business 
man who placed the flower there ? He never 
knew what that lily meant to some in the 
room. Solomon in all his glory was not 
arrayed like this lily, because his magnifi¬ 
cence never so lifted the sick and the 
despondent and the suffering into a sunset 
vision of the great fact of a loving Father’s 
providing care. 

If that business man, weary with his toil¬ 
ing and his spinning of the web of so-called 
profit, could have been seated there just then, 
might not that flower have had a glad mes¬ 
sage for him? 


CHAPTER XVIII 

THE JOYS OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 

The old Pacific Garden Mission was 
crowded on that wild winter’s night. Out¬ 
side the snow was whirling through the 
streets and drifting into doorways. A mot¬ 
ley crowd of men had drifted in beyond the 
snow, and had filled the meeting room to 
overflowing. 

A rousing song service was on until the 
time for testimony came. One after another 
of the men arose to tell what the mission 
had done for him in the name of Christ, and 
to urge others to confess the Saviour. Then 
from the thick of the crowd a large, well- 
dressed man rose to his feet and looked out 
with smiling face over the haggard counte¬ 
nances around him. 

“Boys,” he said, “I cannot tell you how 
happy I am to-night. The Lord has done 
much for me. I used to be a drunkard on 
the street, but to-night I am able to stand 
here to tell you that I am no longer troubled 
117 


1 18 When the Days Seem Dark 

$ 

by drink. It has been a long time since I 
have touched the stuff. Life is all different 
for me to-night. You know just by looking 
at me that I haven’t touched a drink for a 
long, long time. It was just Christ who did 
this for me. He has taken away the temp¬ 
tation from me and I am free from the old 
habit. I don’t know how to tell you how 
happy I am.” Then he lifted his head, 
squared his shoulders, stretched out his 
arms, and smiled broadly as he looked 
around the room. 

“Boys,” he cried, “I don’t believe I could 
be any happier unless I was bigger 1” 

You do not wonder that all through that 
pitiful crowd there was an answering smile 
in the glow of this big man’s joy. For 
Christian joy is a rare thing. Christian for¬ 
titude is not rare. Christian work is com¬ 
mon. Christian faith is everywhere mani¬ 
fest in the lives of many who are serving 
Christ far beyond any ability that their fel¬ 
lows could ever guess they possessed. But 
is not the aboundingly joyful Christian so 
rare that he is a distinguished person among 
the hundreds one meets? Yet joy is nor¬ 
mally a distinguishing characteristic of the 
Gospel. It was for the “joy that was set 


Joys of the Christian Life 119 


before him” that Jesus “endured the cross.” 
He said to his friends, “These things have 
I spoken unto you, that my joy may be in 
you, and that your joy may be made full.” 
That is giving joy a primary place. 

If a Christian lacks joy is he interpreting 
to the world the Gospel or the person of 
Christ ? 

No sooner has one entered into full, con¬ 
scious relationship with Christ than the sheer 
gladness of the whole transaction breaks 
upon his soul like a glorious dawn after a 
night of storm, with an entirely new sense 
of intimate fellowship with one who makes 
all things new. The joy of that fellowship 
springs spontaneously from the relationship 
into which we have entered. We do not 
even invite it or ask for it. It is there in¬ 
herently, and we are steadily conscious of 
that abiding joy unless in our own willful¬ 
ness and perversity or because of entangle¬ 
ment in the things that are not of Christ our 
attention is drawn away from him, our sense 
of intimacy broken. 

As soon as we have entered into fellow¬ 
ship with Christ we also enter into a peculiar 
and far-reaching fellowship with his follow¬ 
ers everywhere. The names of the heroes 


120 When the Days Seem Dark 


of the faith of bygone years take on a dif¬ 
ferent meaning to us. Our friends whom 
we have known as Christians become much 
better understood. We did not care in for¬ 
mer days to let our conversation with them 
get into what we then thought were rather 
unpractical regions of mere speculation, but 
of which now we speak with the eagerness 
of lowlanders who want to get a breath of 
mountain air. The whole significance of 
the word fellowship is different and richer, 
and it gets into our conversation as it never 
did before. 

We find an entirely new joy in service. 
Perhaps we were always more or less phil¬ 
anthropic, ready to do kind things for other 
folks. Now, however, we carry a special 
commission; and the Christian who does not 
know what it is to execute that commission 
is still ignorant of one of the keenest joys 
of the whole Christian experience. We are 
expected to tell others about the Lord Jesus 
and to lead them to him. Is there any joy 
like that which fills one’s heart when one 
has led a friend to Christ and has seen the 
countenance of that friend light up with the 
gladness of the new fellowship with him, 
willingly accepted and entered into? 


Joys of the Christian Life 121 


Another joy of the Christian life is rest 
in guidance. Once we were harried and 
stressed and perplexed. Worry was a com¬ 
mon experience. But the new fellowship 
with Jesus revealed entirely new possibili¬ 
ties of guidance. We began to submit our 
questions to him in quiet waiting. We got 
accustomed to asking his counsel about the 
simplest matter. There came to be a real 
joy in not knowing how things would work 
out, a delight beyond words in simply trust¬ 
ing. There was a time perhaps when we 
were driven to distraction by impetuous 
haste to reach conclusions in matters that 
had to be left open for a little while. Fel¬ 
lowship with Christ teaches us that while we 
are poor timekeepers and makers of ap¬ 
pointments, God times his appointments to 
a nicety, and we find great joy in watching 
the unfolding of his plans under his own 
hand, instead of trying impatiently to tear 
them open, as we used to, with our nervous 
fingers. 

A comprehensive joy of the Christian life 
is to learn for the first time what joy really 
is. The old burden of sin spoiled joy. In 
Christ the burden and the bondage alike are 
taken away from us. For the first time we 


122 When the Days Seem Dark 

are free to know pure joy, the glad exalta¬ 
tion of a heart in unhindered fellowship 
with one whose joy is so great that he never 
fully set it forth in human words for the 
mind of man. What his disciples saw in 
him he intended they should have in them¬ 
selves. Christ himself was his definition of 
joy. And there is no joy apart from him. 
Have you as much as you could have ? 


CHAPTER XIX 

"AND HAVE IT ABUNDANTLY” 

It is a passion with every thoroughly 
alive man or woman to live life to the full. 
No one of that clan wants to pass through 
the world with life at a low ebb. The flood- 
tide of opportunity and achievement is the 
great experience the soul longs for. Any¬ 
thing short of the flood-tide has too much 
fellowship with the mud-flat, dead-level of 
monotonous mediocrity, and the whole for¬ 
lorn outlook and savor of the favorite 
haunts of the clam. Unless one can know 
that the tide is rising, pushing its clean, 
crowding waters over the low levels and up 
the white beaches, one is uneasy, and im¬ 
patient, and doubtful of the efficiency that 
has had its opportunity but seems to have 
missed its achievement. 

No one can rightly be content with a life 
that is less than it might be. It is normal 
and right that this passion for living should 
123 


124 When the Days Seem Dark 


grip us. The powers of brain and body and 
spirit must press on or die. We need the 
sense of occupation, in which faculties are 
taxed, time seems to fly, and the bounds of 
our activities are bent and driven outwards. 
No one is really living who is not conscious 
of demand, pressure, urgency, in the calls 
of duty. 

Many of us do not have the courage to 
want to live in any full-blooded, flood-tide 
fashion. The pressure that we need is 
smoothly avoided; the taxing under any 
work is dodged as some men dodge other 
taxes; the bounds of our activities are never 
strained outward, but are forever narrow¬ 
ing; and we contentedly watch them come 
in, settling down into the thing that pleases 
us, soothes us, and does not make any severe 
demands upon us. This is not life. It is 
less than half-life. 

Others of us have never attempted to use 
one-tenth of the power that God has given 
us. We lift with the little finger when we 
might lay hold with both hands. We have 
never known what we could do, because we 
have never driven ourselves to the limit. 
We work in fractions, not in units. Afraid 
of overdoing, we underdo. Our petty aches 


“And Have It Abundantly” 125 


and pains, bad weather, bad roads, hot 
weather, cold weather,—anything untoward, 
—is cause for inaction, and sometimes ample 
means will make a man so easy in mind and 
body that he never enters at any time into 
the glory of hard work, the taxing use of his 
powers, but lives a listless and unfruitful 
life because he is not obliged to live other¬ 
wise by outward pressure. Such a man can 
put on the appearance of manliness; he can 
wear an earnest look; but body and brain are 
still in the playtime of boyhood. 

There is another and far greater com¬ 
pany whose lives are not yet at the flood- 
tide,—those of us who are not afraid of the 
full life, who have no part or lot with the 
listless lover of ease, but who are neverthe¬ 
less living far within the bounds that might 
be ours. Every new day is only the old 
story of drudgery renewed. The whole life 
seems set about with littleness, with the sub¬ 
duing, smothering atmosphere of duties that 
seem to have but a small place in the uni¬ 
versal movement. It is all a matter of three 
meals a day, the trip to and from work, or 
the cleaning of rooms, and answering of 
door-bells; the doing of trivial things for 
the children in the home, the unending fight 


126 When the Days Seem Dark 


for gain at the store or office, an occasional 
visit to the sick, with here and there a meet¬ 
ing or conference, and sometimes long, 
lonely days and evenings when nothing 
especially worthy seems to have been ac¬ 
complished. Life becomes routine. It loses 
zest. Its horizon narrows, and the whole 
being dwindles into what is only a semblance 
of the true human complex we call man. It 
is a busy life, but atmosphered in a hopeless 
sense of one's own inability to break out of 
it to anything fuller and richer. 

In contrast with this life is another into 
which many have entered deliberately, a 
life of intense activity, noised up and down 
the land as exemplary in the things most to 
be desired. It is glutted with things. Its 
purpose is possession. Its god is gain. And 
its hours are packed with every known 
means for self-gratification, with no horizon 
beyond that narrowest of all life-bounds, the 
pitiful circle of self. Into this glittering 
and shallow life many a man is drawn by 
the desire to compete for its prizes, and to 
be well ahead in the spectacular procession. 
Here is spurious fulness of life, parading 
so impressively before men that the igno¬ 
rant are completely deceived by it. The 


‘And Have It Abundantly” 127 


great constructive geniuses, whose wealth is 
incidental to the normal outworking of their 
genius, are not in that feverish procession. 
It is made up of. another kind, whose lives 
are given over to the mere pageantry of 
materialism in its most degraded forms of 
selfishness, and where fulness of life is quite 
unknown and unsought. 

Besides all these there are the fearful and 
unenterprising who do not dare to move out 
into new experiences, who prefer past 
doings to future possibilities as the measure 
of what they can do. These are never pio¬ 
neers in anything. They have no sense of 
growth, no pressure from within, no com¬ 
pelling ideals beyond the things they can 
easily do. They are by no means free from 
worry, but their concern, unfortunately, is 
not over their present condition. What 
gives them sleepless nights and cold per¬ 
spiration is the thought that they may, much 
against their will, be thrown out of present 
grooves, out of the old, into the new and 
untried. Their heart’s wish is not that their 
world “may spin for ever down the ringing 
grooves of change,” but rather that it may 
turn moderately on its axis as nearly in one 
spot as possible. To those of us in this state 


128 When the Days Seem Dark 


of mind the worst pains imaginable are 
“growing-pains.” 

But how may cowardice, and disuse of 
powers, and the dulness of drudgery, selfish 
materialism, fear of change, and all the drag 
of sinful weakness within us give place to 
the fulness of life for which the inmost soul 
is hungering? How sturdily we have tried 
to lift ourselves into the life we long for! 
What bitter hours of vain striving we have 
had in the effort to be courageous, to arouse 
dead powers, to be cheerful, when the daily 
grind is almost unbearable, and to walk 
smilingly and hopefully into the darkness 
of a new experience through which we can¬ 
not see at all! How we have fought with 
self-gratification and the lust for the things 
that perish even in our grasp! And while 
we have been trying to do all this for our¬ 
selves, or hopelessly submitting to the nar¬ 
rowing of life, Jesus has been close beside 
us, offering freely, as the expressed purpose 
of his own life, the overflowing life for 
which we seek. 

It is a marvel that we do not accept that 
offer in its fulness, that we do not open our 
littleness to the incoming of the ideals, the 
hopefulness, the far vision, the intrepid 


“And Have It Abundantly” 129 

pioneer spirit of Jesus, the complete indwell¬ 
ing of the Christ in us as our present 
Saviour from the life that is less than it 
might be. 

The purpose of his coming is fulfilled in 
us only when we accept, in accepting him, 
the overflowing life, the abundant life which 
it was and is his purpose to bring. It is not 
a larger sphere that we need, but a fuller 
life in whatever sphere is ours tq-day. And 
Christ does not truly dwell in any man with¬ 
out causing that man’s life to break old 
boundaries, to take on new passions for ser¬ 
vice, new hopefulness, new purity, new 
gains in character and power, whatever the 
sphere of his life. Fulness of life, its 
abundance, is not a question of what a man’s 
work is, but what he is in that work if God 
has called him to it. To a friend who asked 
Phillips Brooks the secret of his life, he 
wrote: 

“Indeed the more I have thought it over, 
the less in some sense I have seemed to have 
to Say. And yet the more it has seemed to 
me that these last years have had a peace 
and fulness which there did not use to be. 

I say it in deep reverence and humility. I 
do not think it is the mere quietness of ad- 


9 


130 When the Days Seem Dark 


vancing age. I am sure it is not indifference 
to anything which I used to care for. I am 
sure that it is a deeper knowledge and truer 
love of Christ. And it seems to me impos¬ 
sible that this should have come in any way 
except by the experience of life. . . . All 
experience comes to be but more and more 
of pressure of His life on ours. It cannot 
come by one flash of light, or one great con¬ 
vulsive event. It comes without haste and 
without rest in this perpetual living of our 
life with Him. And all the history, of outer 
or inner life, of the changes of circum¬ 
stances, or the changes of thought, gets its 
meaning and value from this constantly 
growing relation to Christ. 

“I cannot tell you how personal this grows 
to me. He is here. He knows me and I 
know Him. It is no figure of speech. It is 
the realest thing in the world. And every 
day makes it realer. And one wonders with 
delight what it will grow to as the years 
go on.” 

If life is not at its flood with any one of 
us, why not have it so, and “have it abun¬ 
dantly”? 


CHAPTER XX 

THE INESCAPABLE SPIRIT OF GOD 

No searching of man after God can for 
a single instant approach in eagerness and 
persistence God's quest for man. 

The mystic yearns for God with a holy 
longing that is restless and unsatisfied until 
the barriers of material contacts with life 
have been overcome. The sinner, heartsick 
and outworn by his self-chosen facing away 
from God, turns at last to seek him with 
contrition and the unutterable longing of 
an emptiness of soul that has become intol¬ 
erable. But neither of these seekers after 
God can approach in their passionate search 
the unresting, infinitely patient, age-long and 
persistent search of God for man. Their 
purposes may waver, and their zeal die 
away in the atmosphere of the earthly and 
the material; his never does, through the 
endless years. 

And the Spirit of God is inescapable. Men 
131 


132 When the Days Seem Dark 


try to avoid him; to turn resolutely to their 
material concerns; to enter with zest into 
enterprises that promise selfish gains or 
passing pleasures; to become men of the 
world, molded by its ideals, and apt in its 
ways, and clever at its games of give and 
take. But underneath all this, running 
steadily down the center of life's currents, 
is the main stream of God's desire for man's 
surrender to him. It pushes past all the 
eddies beside its course, and is seen to be 
inevitable, no matter what ripples and cross¬ 
currents disturb its surface. Men are busy 
enough outside the sweep of that current; 
they fight along its edges for success; they 
gain worldly power, break others down, 
build up a fellow-workman here and there-; 
their faces take on the grimness and cynical 
look of life as they choose to live it, while 
God very silently often, but always inescap¬ 
ably, is pressing his quest for the soul that 
may live if it will. 

The Psalmist unfolds this truth in the one 
hundred and thirty-ninth Psalm, with broad 
imagery and minute particularity in his in¬ 
spired effort to show how thorough and 
loving and far-reaching is this search for 
man. God knows us. He has studied me 


The Inescapable Spirit of God 133 

thoroughly. He knows when I stay or go, 
and where. He anticipates my thoughts. 
He knows what I think and do. Even my 
words he notes. Around me is his envelop¬ 
ing care, and I can feel his hand upon me. 

And now comes the outcry of a soul that 
is simply staggered by the vision. Heaven¬ 
ward leaps the imagination; God is there. 
Down into the depths, and God is there. 
Then, with the vision of the poet, the true 
seer, out through the gates of day the soul 
wings its course, and circles the wide sweep 
of the sea horizon, and behold, that loving 
hand is even there, in guidance and support. 
Then the darkness comes; but it is no longer 
darkness, for to be with God in the dark is 
simply to be in the white light of day. 

No one has greater need of appreciating 
this truth than the Christian who has thus 
far kept God a little at a distance. It is 
hard to believe such folly and sin of our¬ 
selves, in the light of what we know is our 
belief in God. Yet many of us have only 
an incomplete and unpractical belief, which 
often would seem, from our practise of it, 
little more than a cool assent of the mind to 
a plain fact, rather than the outpouring of' 
a loyal heart of love and self-surrender in 


134 When the Days Seem Dark 


the service of the King. To believe that 
God is true is one thing; to be true to that 
belief in daily living means something more 
than an assent to the fact. To believe that 
the Spirit is pressing lovingly into the sanc¬ 
tuary of our lives to bless us is one thing; 
to let the Spirit have the freedom of our 
lives in ungrudging hospitality is another 
thing. And the believing Christian who 
knows nothing of headlong and self-forget¬ 
ting, self-abolishing abandon in throwing 
life open to the insistent and unwearying 
Spirit of God, is still holding God at a dis¬ 
tance. 

Some Christians have so misunderstood 
the Father and the Son and the Spirit that 
in times of peculiar danger or unexpected 
failure of cherished plans they have been 
tempted to think that God has withdrawn 
his guiding hand, and has decided that he 
could no longer use such dull and unserv¬ 
iceable tools. A man has made a failure of 
the thing to which he has given his life, 
and thinks his work ended. A woman finds 
herself bereft of husband and children, and, 
standing like a lost traveler on a trackless 
plain, sees no hope of ever getting her bear¬ 
ings again. Or health has gone, and shut-in 


The Inescapable Spirit of God 135 

days replace days of intense activity among 
men, and this is taken as a sign that God is 
through with that worker. So reasons the 
troubled mind, gathering up in this way a 
burden that is'quite beyond the strength of 
our spiritual and physical frame. 

But God is there, just the same. He has 
not ceased his work. And he has not cast 
aside his workers. Some are diverted, in 
his plan, to other service. Some in what 
they call failure will for the first time learn 
how God defines success. Some in loneli¬ 
ness will learn as never before what it is to 
walk with the King in a large companion¬ 
ship thronging with rich experiences. Some 
in the quiet room will do more than in the 
pulpit, or office, or school-room, or will do 
less, and will do either with an unconquer¬ 
able good-cheer because living out the 
plainly revealed plan of God. 

The blessed fact is that hard upon these 
puzzling and sometimes heartbreaking ex¬ 
periences out of which we come as changed 
and chastened souls, the Spirit of God is 
following as the Comforter, the Strength¬ 
ened the Guide into the whole truth of the 
matter, and not even the night of our own 
making or the shadows of this world in 


136 When the Days Seem Dark 


which we live need at all to hold us away 
from him. 

“Still, still with Thee, when purple morning breaketh, 
When the bird waketh, and the shadows flee: 

Fairer than morning, lovelier than the daylight, 
Dawns the sweet consciousness, I am with Thee. 

“Alone with Thee, amid the mystic shadows, 

The solemn hush of nature newly born; 

Alone with Thee, in breathless adoration, 

In the calm dew and freshness of the morn. 

“When sinks the soul, subdued by toil, to slumber, 
Its closing eye looks up to Thee in prayer; 

Sweet the repose, beneath Thy wings o’ershadowing, 
But sweeter still to wake and find Thee there. 

“So shall it be at last in that bright morning 

When the soul waketh, and life’s shadows flee; 

O! in that hour, and fairer than day’s dawning, 
Shall rise the glorious thought, I am with Thee!” 




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